User 85pandora reported that the exchange service Tomboi stole about $100,000 from him. According to him, he made an exchange of 250 XMR for 50 ETH, but received only $10 back. After contacting support, both the website and the onion version of the platform went completely offline. Strangely enough, he had previously made several small transactions with this exchanger, and everything had worked without any problems.

User albon verified all the evidence and confirmed that the 250 XMR were indeed received by the platform, but instead of the promised 50 ETH, only a tiny transfer of 0.005 ETH was sent in return. A video recorded by the victim showed that the site's interface displayed a notification of a successful payout, even though in reality almost no money had been sent. According to user albon, sending $10 instead of the full amount was a trick — it created the appearance of a completed transaction and gave the scammers time before the victim raised the alarm.

As it turned out, the red flags had been visible from the very beginning. User Bitcoin_Arena pointed out that Tomboi's forum account had been purchased from a previous owner, which is strongly discouraged. User AakZaki had warned back in April that this account was linked to previously banned scam profiles. User LoyceV noted that the site was only about a month old, and trusting it with $100,000 was extremely reckless.

User FinneysTrueVision discovered connections between Tomboi and the obscure casino betKarma — both domains were registered through the same reseller, and their wallets interacted via NEAR Intents with the same referral identifier. This indicates that the scammers had sufficient liquidity to make the payout — they simply decided to steal the large sum.

Fortunately, the victim was able to partially recoup the losses. User KycNotList paid out $9,000 from the escrow deposit that Tomboi had placed on their platform. User Little Mouse also promised to transfer $10,000 from another escrow. Thus, the victim managed to recover about $19,000 of the lost $100,000. User hugeblack confirmed that these payments were indeed received.

After the scandal, the scammer deleted all of his forum posts. According to user LoyceV, he deleted only the messages created after the account purchase, which points to an attempt to cover his tracks. User logfiles added that the same scammer registered on the Altcointalk forum with a similar ad, but there the moderators disabled the ability to edit posts and flagged the account as a scammer. The KYCnot.me administrator (user pluja) also promptly marked Tomboi as a fraudulent service in his directory, acknowledging that the review moderation system needs improvement in order to respond more quickly to cases like this.