If you're unfamiliar with TheShadowBroker's Monthly Dump Service, start out by reading the Monthly Dump Service background section of my post here. Otherwise, skip right ahead:
Negative Feedback
On July 11th at 21:38 (UTC), 
The post begins:
TheShadowBrokers ripped me off. I paid 500 XMR for their “Wine of the Month Club” and only they sent me a single tool that already requires me to have a box exploited.
and then turns into an interesting tirade against TheShadowBrokers.
Rational followers of hacking news remained skeptical -- after all, anonymous posters make crazy claims with no way to back them up all the time. The most likely explanation was that
I did notice one interesting detail in
In an earlier article, I described how I scraped e-mail addresses for TheShadowBrokers's(TSB) Monero customers from the XMR blockchain, and found a cap for how much XMR TSB may have earned from their monthly dump service. After seeing
One of the e-mail addresses I found was fucksyourmoms@**********.com. This is very similar to
Of course, just using the same username as a publicly available e-mail address is pretty weak evidence for such grand claims and careful observers (myself included) remained skeptical.
Fortunately, Monero was actually designed to be able to handle situations like this, and thus it is possible to prove that a payment was sent if you have the payment address, payment transaction ID, and a secret payment key known only to the sender.
Read this link. It explains the secret payment key better than I can.
In my post, I set goal lines for what would convince me (and most cryptographers) that
If it's not a hoax and
1.) Using the e-mail address from the tx linked above. (Proves identity but doesn't actually prove payment was sent.)
2.) Post the secret tx key from their Monero payment to TSB. (Proves identity AND that payment was sent.)
In a steemit post and tweet earlier today,
We now have:
- TSB's XMR payment address (41jwGGMNRBKNurVnuo7ZW4HqrgPnfiJbfHUi3k46b5nFhvbpwcK6KdTSjvTRdbzdEzZbQ1t5GWhsW7scxcNv2adUJSbtExP) from this post by TSB
- the payment transaction ID (782dc6139511ac4f5515a91452b1c5f019594b63a8cc8e015b8cd4b411af0d36) from the tx that I identified as containing the fucksyourmoms@**********.com e-mail address in my post here.
I entered these into Monero GUI 2:
Click check and voilà:
Of course, you shouldn't take my word for it. You should download a Monero client and check yourself. Alternatively, if you trust xmrchain.net, you can verify it there:
- View the Monero transaction on xmrchain.net
- Scroll down to the box that says 'Decode outputs/Prove sending', select 'Prove sending'
- Enter the private key and TSB payment address from above.
- Click prove sending and it will verify the payment for you.
It'll look like this:
Conclusions:
received at least 500 XMR from their June Monthly Dump. (They may have received significantly more, see my post about that.)
To be clear, my intention with these posts is in no way to judge or interfere with TSB's and
If you have any questions or comments, or caught any mistakes, please don't hesitate to post a comment, PM me or e-mail me. If you didn't get something, odds are a lot of other readers didn't understand it either so please ask me to clarify it!
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