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Within minutes after $Jenner launched, Vaiman and other online detectives noticed a familiar pattern. "The Caitlyn Jenner hack is a very well organized pump and dump scam," one wrote. Sure enough, Vaiman's software tool showed that a mysterious holder had dumped a huge portion of the coin shortly after launch. Even more telling, the same wallet posted by Jenner was used in four other celebrity tokens released that month — two from the rappers Rich the Kid and Soulja Boy, and two from the models Kazumi and Ivana Knöll. That suggested the same person was running the launch for each of the coins — that a single mastermind was behind the pump and dumps.

"In a second, you can see that the tokens they're launching are full of crap," Vaiman recalls. "And you can see a lot of insider activity, because all of the holders are connected — which is a clear indicator that the people launching the coin actually own a lot of the supply, and they don't want you to know."

As outrage and confusion about her coin spread, Jenner found herself racing to do damage control. "I have not been hacked," she tweeted two hours after releasing $Jenner. "I am out on the golf course." She included a video from her manager Sophia Hutchins, who was wearing a blue windbreaker and a peach hairband. "You guys," Hutchins said, "her account has not been hacked. You can rest assured her crypto is definitely performing extraordinarily well."

Despite the assurances, it didn't take long for Jenner's coin to tank. Within days, after peaking at a market cap north of $46 million, it plunged by more than 65%. Vaiman and other crypto detectives, meanwhile, traced the wallet used in the five celebrity coins back to one man: Sahil Arora, an Indian national in his mid-20s who was living in Dubai.

But the mystery only deepened. The celebrities who had promoted the meme coins now claimed they had been played by Arora. "This guy pretty much made a pump-and-dump and dumped all the money into his account and blocked me," Rich the Kid said in a video posted to X. Jenner also took to Twitter to say she had been conned by Arora. "FUCK SAHIL!" she tweeted. "He scammed us! BIG TIME!"

Were the celebrities victims of Arora? Or were some of them, as Vaiman suspected, accomplices in the scam? "We all were wondering," Vaiman recalls, "who was this mysterious Sahil?"

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Sahil Arora has been hustling since he dropped out of high school to launch his own taxi app, Cabby, to challenge Uber. "I'm offering a better business model," he boasted at the time. The app soon went bust. His next venture, creating ATMs for bitcoins, landed him in Forbes India. "We are mainstreaming cryptocurrency," Arora declared, "and we are just getting started." His mission was, as he put it, to alter the way cryptocurrencies are used in "wealth formation and pump & dump." With over a million followers, his Instagram checks all the usual influencer boxes. Selfies with celebrities? Check. Shots of the nightlife in Dubai? Check. Videos of himself behind the wheel of a Batmobile? Check.

In the wake of the Jenner coin dump, Arora was eager to pump himself. The day after $Jenner launched, with speculation about him boiling over in the crypto community, he admitted that he was, in fact, the mastermind behind the coin. To prove it, he produced a screenshot of a contract he claimed to have with Jenner, including what he said was her signature. Celebrities, he explained, were eager to do business with him. "Sometimes I go to them," he told the online publication Decrypt. "Most of the time they come and I pick." Celebrity coins, he added, are "the only way to make crypto more mainstream and benefit from the attention economy."

For celebrities new to the cyber circus, Arora's pitch was simple: He would act as the ringleader behind the curtain, minting the tokens and planning the rollout. They, in turn, would hype the tokens on their social platforms, driving up the price. Arora could then use the publicity to his advantage, selling off his huge stake in the tokens and causing their value to crash, leaving investors with massive losses. Given the encrypted nature of crypto wallets, there's no way to know whether the celebrities were in on the rug pulls, or simply victims of an unscrupulous promoter.

Seizing on the attention over $Jenner, Arora announced a new coin he was launching with the rapper Iggy Azalea. "This next one is gonna be crazy HUGE and will make JENNER look small," he posted on his Telegram channel. There was just one problem: According to one of Azalea's advisors, she hadn't made any deal with Arora. Her manager, Reece Pearson, had reached out to Hutchins to check up on Jenner's experience with the promoter.

Hutchins was blunt. "He just rugged us for like $3 million," she told Pearson. "We're trying to get the authorities after him, but we can't find him."

"I'm messaging him on WhatsApp right now," Pearson replied.

Later that night, when asked by a follower on X if she was in contact with Arora, Azalea snapped back. "I was in contact enough to smell he's a bitch," she replied.

The next day, Azalea launched her own meme coin, $mother. To promote it, she posted a selfie from her car, wearing a white tank top and flipping a bird with her French-manicured nails. "Don't disappoint your mother," she wrote, urging her fans to buy the token.

But as the coin took off, Vaiman began to suspect that Arora was cashing in on it. After analyzing the traffic for $mother, he found that a wallet identified as "JEEt3D1" had bought 20% of the coins before launch — and then dumped them for a $2 million profit. Because there had been no public access to $mother prior to launch, it suggested that Arora was at it again. "We found huge insider activity on MOTHER," Vaiman posted on X, along with his report.

Azalea denied any involvement in the rug pull, saying it took her by surprise. "I've never dumped $2 million," she told the podcast "Unchained." She said she owned only 3% of her own coin, and blamed unnamed "randoms" who she said "have ultimate control of if the token lives or dies."

With Jenner and Azalea accusing him of fraud, Arora was barred from X for violating its terms of service. "I guess this is what happens when you mess with powerful, well-connected people like $JENNER," Jenner posted. "RIP — I mean srsly how dumb can the guy be to do what he did to the $JENNER community?! Srsly!"

But as leading crypto stars declared their innocence, Vaiman only became more determined to expose the misdeeds of Arora — along with any stars who had been complicit in the scams. "We started to investigate all these meme coins by celebrities," Vaiman says. "And every time they were actually being super shady about it."

Then came what Vaiman and other crypto sleuths consider the shadiest move of all.

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On June 23, less than a month after the $Jenner scam, the singer-songwriter Jason Derulo posted the message "let me take you dancin" on X, punctuated by a fire emoji. Followers were directed to the address for $Jason, his newly minted meme coin on Pump.fun.

It took only minutes for the price of the coin to soar, and then plummet. Given Arora's recent pump and dumps, the crypto sleuths swiftly called bullshit, accusing Derulo of being in on the scam. "Another day of knockoff celeb scamming crypto people," one posted to Derulo on X.

Derulo insisted he was in it "for the long haul," saying he had bought $20,000 of the coin. To reassure nervous investors, he shared the address of his crypto wallet and issued an all-caps promise: "Watch my wallet I'm the top wallet on $JASON I WILL NEVER SELL."

But Vaiman soon heard a different story from the most unlikely of sources: Sahil Arora himself. Ever since Vaiman's investigation of the Jenner coin, he and Arora had been trading texts. "He's a complicated figure," Vaiman says. "He's very egocentric, and he loves to have attention." Now, out of the blue, Arora confessed to cashing in on the Derulo coin. He shared a wallet with Vaiman showing that he had owned half the supply of $Jason — and then dumped it minutes after Derulo promoted the coin, pocketing a cool $180,000.

Vaiman was confused. It made no sense that Arora would turn over evidence that implicated himself so clearly. "Why is this guy just committing everything to us?" Vaiman wondered. "What's the point? He is surrendering."

But he was doing more than that. Arora shared another address for a wallet — one he said belonged to Derulo. Vaiman could see that the wallet had received $Jason tokens directly from Arora — and then turned around and dumped $20,000 in coins, not long after Derulo had promised he would "NEVER SELL." The evidence seemed to suggest that Derulo himself was complicit in the crypto scheme.

"Jason Derulo was actually selling behind his community's back," Vaiman says. "That was a big piece of evidence."

And there was more. To Vaiman's surprise, Arora supplied him with what he said was evidence of his communications with Derulo, indicating that they had conspired together to dump the coin. It was all there: video recordings Arora had made of his Instagram DMs and WhatsApp messages with Derulo, discussing the creation and launch of $Jason.

Still, Vaiman couldn't be sure the messages were authentic, or that the wallet supplied by Arora actually belonged to Derulo. After pressing for more proof, he was in for another shock: Arora sent him Derulo's WhatsApp number and told him to contact the singer himself.

"He actually sent me the number of Jason Derulo," Vaiman recalls. "That was out of nowhere. I was so surprised."

Using the WhatsApp number, Vaiman fired off a text to whoever was on the other end. He didn't expect a response — but within an hour, his phone rang. It was Derulo. He sounded like he was in a car, and he was eating as he spoke.

"The guy literally didn't give a shit," Vaiman recalls, imitating Derulo talking with a mouthful of food. "He was like, 'Yeah, yeah, I just do this for the people.'"

Vaiman laid a trap. "You haven't been selling, right?" he asked Derulo. "It's what you said on Twitter."

"Yes," Vaiman recalls Derulo replying.

"Well, then what about this address?" Vaiman asked, referring to the wallet Arora had sent him.

"Oh yeah, my bad," Derulo said. "I forgot — yes, it is my address." He claimed he was using the wallet for "marketing purposes." But that was all Vaiman needed. Derulo had admitted the wallet was his — and the wallet had been used in the pump and dump.

Last July, Vaiman posted the results of his investigation online. Derulo, like Jenner and Azalea before him, claimed he'd been duped by Arora. "Damn Sahil got me!" he posted on X. He acknowledged that he had sold off $20,000 during the initial trading — but he claimed he had reinvested the money in the coin. "There's money taken out, but the money was just moved," he said. "It went right back into $JASON." But why would he sell and then buy again? For that, Derulo had no answer. "I honestly don't remember," he said on a podcast in July.

Vaiman's investigation went viral, gaining millions of views and triggering an outcry from crypto investors. "These celebs need to be prosecuted," one posted on X. "Every one of them is now going to use this Jenner playbook and use Sahil as the scapegoat," another predicted.

Derulo, who continues to maintain his innocence, declined requests from Business Insider for comment. But he was apparently furious that the details of his transactions had been made public. "You're an idiot," he told Vaiman on WhatsApp.

Someone else was happy about Vaiman's bombshell. Delighted by all the attention, Arora decided to share even more with the cyber sleuth. "Here's what I'm gonna do," he wrote Vaiman. "I'm gonna send you all the proofs of all the celebrities I've been working with, all the exchanges. We've had private DMs and stuff, and I want you to share this to the world."

As Vaiman read through the messages, his eyes widened. Some of the celebrities, he says, appeared to have been taken in by Arora. But it looked to him as though others had been part of the scams from the outset. They relied on Arora to hold tokens for them — and then to sell them after the market soared. If anyone accused the stars of staging a rug pull, all they had to do was to assert their innocence, and blame the mysterious guy in Dubai.

"Many of the celebrities, they wanted a scapegoat," Vaiman says. "So you can work with Sahil, pretend you're getting fooled, and then you have an excuse for when things turn south." One exchange, Vaiman says, shows Arora and a celebrity discussing what to do if the coin's price plunged. "Just say it's me," Arora reassured the celebrity. "Just say I've been the bad guy."

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Sahil Arora wants money. That's what he told me when I reached out to him for an interview. At first, he declined to address the controversies around him. "I don't wish to speak on anything," he messaged me on Telegram. Then he offered to share his story — for a price.

"I would want a reimbursement," he wrote. "If not then I'm not interested." He began laying his hype on me as if he were pumping a new coin. "I'll have a one on one conversation about everything," he wrote. "You'll have exclusive news." When I explained that it's unethical for journalists to pay for interviews, he compared himself to the celebrities on his Instagram pages. "I've made it clear, it's same as any artist," he wrote me. "They get paid to do shows and write exclusive content." With no payment forthcoming, he declined to be interviewed.

The feds, for their part, have started to crack down on crypto schemes. In 2023, after a sweeping investigation, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges against eight entertainers — including the actor Lindsay Lohan, the porn star Kendra Lust, and the rappers Soulja Boy, Lil Yachty, Ne-Yo, and Akon — accusing them of illegally concealing their role in promoting two crypto tokens. Justin Sun, a 34-year-old Chinese crypto king, was charged with fraud, accused by the SEC of "orchestrating a promotional campaign in which he and his celebrity promoters hid the fact that the celebrities were paid for their tweets."

"It demonstrates again the high risk investors face when crypto asset securities are offered and sold without proper disclosure," said Gary Gensler, the chair of the SEC at the time. The stars settled the case for a total of $400,000, without admitting guilt. Sun's organization, the Tron foundation, denounced the charges as "yet another salvo in the SEC's ever-widening campaign seeking dominion over digital assets." The case is still ongoing.

In October, for the first time, the Justice Department filed criminal charges over what it said was illegal manipulation of the token market. To catch 18 alleged grifters, the FBI created its own meme coin, called $NexFundAI, and used it to identify and track shady sales. It was a bit like putting marked bills into the underworld and following where they popped up. On October 30, one of the accused, Liu Zhou, the founder of the Chinese crypto finance firm MyTrade MM, pleaded guilty to market manipulation and fraud. The next day, Aleksei Andriunin, the founder and CEO of Gotbit, was indicted on charges of wire fraud and conspiracy to commit market manipulation. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. Gotbit released a statement defending Andriunin: "We aim to prove the innocence of the company and our CEO."

"These are cases where an innovative technology — cryptocurrency — met a century-old scheme — the pump and dump," said Joshua Levy, the federal prosecutor overseeing the cases. "The message today is, if you make false statements to trick investors, that's fraud. Period."

But the government crackdown may prove short-lived. Trump has embraced crypto, promising to make America "the crypto capital of the planet." Last year, he and his sons launched their own crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, with a $30 million investment from Sun, the crypto investor charged with fraud. The president has nominated Paul Atkins, a vocal proponent of cryptocurrencies, to replace Gensler as head of the SEC. And Trump's own meme coin — unveiled at a "Crypto Ball" held to celebrate his inauguration — follows a familiar pattern, with Trump's team holding at least 80% of the coin's supply. Vaiman, using his mapping tool, found that 89% of Melania Trump's token is held in a single crypto wallet.

Jenner, who had promised to donate some of the proceeds from her meme coin to Trump's campaign, is facing legal troubles of her own. In November, two buyers of Jenner's token, who said they lost $50,000 on the investment, asked a federal judge to approve a class-action lawsuit against Jenner, alleging that she "fraudulently solicited financially unsophisticated investors" to purchase the asset. By failing to disclose Arora's involvement, they said, Jenner "willfully failed" in her duty to investors.

Peter Grazul, an attorney for the victims, expects as many as 1,000 investors to join the lawsuit. "They're very upset," he tells me. "The monetary compensation is a big deal for them. But they're also heartbroken that they put their trust in a celebrity who was making them all these promises, and who then ran off with the bag." $Jenner is now down 99% from its all-time high. Jenner, for her part, is promoting a new token — "the only official Jenner meme coin," her manager tells me, which "she launched after Sahil."

A business partner of Azalea, meanwhile, presents the singer's involvement with Arora as a cautionary tale. "You can't trust a guy just because he has an Instagram profile with a bunch of pics with celebrities," says McCann, the crypto investor, who is working with Azalea to launch an online casino. "Because meme coins are a digital proxy to lottery tickets, in most cases, they're accessible by anybody within the internet, so scammers like Sahil can prey upon that."

The scams, in fact, show no signs of abating. In November, Haliey Welch — better known as Hawk Tuah Girl — launched her own meme coin. Within hours it reached a market cap of $490 million — only to plunge by 90% after a small group of wallets sold off more than 80% of the token's supply. Welch has denied any wrongdoing, but investors were furious. "My $35,000 that I purchased of $HAWK is now $2,000 after 10 minutes of buying," one wrote on X. "I am a huge fan of Hawk Tuah but you took my life savings."

With so many scammers still lurking in the cyber markets, Vaiman is racing to expose as many of them as possible. Since the Derulo drama, he's chronicled what he alleges are pump and dumps from the FIFA star Ronaldinho and the NBA champ Scottie Pippen, both of whom have denied any wrongdoing. "The issue is: 100 celebrities dropped coins, and 98 of them happened to be pump and dumps," Pippen's business partner, Kiarash Behain, tells me. "And the two that weren't were Iggy Azalea and Scottie."

But with Arora still at large, Vaiman remains holed up in France, safeguarding his location. "I don't know if the guy is dangerous," he says, "but I like this whole crypto stuff to stay digital." Investigators have been stymied in their efforts to locate Arora. "We're actively working with individuals and families affected by Sahil Arora's endeavors," says Saad Kassis Mohamed, the chair of a nonprofit foundation in India. "We have reached out to address these concerns, but unfortunately we have not received any response from him at this time."

Arora, meanwhile, continues to promote the occasional meme coin. On a recent post on his Instagram account, he enjoyed having the last laugh.

"Just checked my bank account," he said. "That shit said $L,MAO,OO.OO."

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David Kushner is a regular contributor to Business Insider. His new book is "Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game."

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