So today we're talking about a stage four cancer patient who pretty much just wanted
some creator fees from his meme coin to pay for his cancer treatment.
And what happened next kind of shows both the
cruelest side of cyber crime that exists and kind of the most beautiful response
from the internet when good people decide to actually fight back.
I think it also shows the power that exists in the collective.
It was smaller than a tennis ball basically.
The lump started growing on my back it started becoming bigger and bigger
and it started already pressing on some of my nerves inside my uh leg spine
so I couldn't walk I couldn't do anything and because in lot we it was minus 20 degrees
I was also extra sensitive
like it has stopped to growing for the first time it doesn't like
I can't explain to you guys the feeling that it hasn't given me during the nights like
imagine that 24 December I fly to my country I
I met my family everything was fine I was playing with like my mom's dog
with my brother stuff like that and three days later I was tied to bed for
how much it is almost 10 months.
And this is a departure from the typical stuff that I tend to talk about on this channel
but I do think that it's important the good people that are actually out there
now rastlin tv his cancer token on pump fund generates creator fees
that basically fund his treatment after his family went bankrupt in December of 2024
from his medical costs and his brother javado sorry if I mispronounce your name dude but
they really desperately needed every dollar like they could possibly get their hands on
first survival and on September 20th of 2025 while rastlin tv was actually broadcasting live
an unknown individual ended up contacting him with what seemed like a legitimate opportunity
and they offered him financial compensation to basically play a steam demo of a game called
block blasters and don't go actually looking for this game it's not what you actually think
on the outside it looks like a free to play game that's listed on steam under app id 3872350
for a dying man that's struggling to try and pay for cancer treatment any income really looked
kind of like hope and the attackers had done their homework in this case they had reached out
to him and they knew about his financial desperation they had studied his medical condition they
attract his streaming schedule and they crafted their offer specifically to exploit his specific
dire circumstances knowing exactly how desperate he actually was for any source of income
this was absolutely a targeted psychological warfare opera social engineering whatever you
call it and it had really really profound and devastating results he ended up downloading
the executable directly from steam during his live broadcast and he ran it immediately
because he trusted valves platform and this is a great lesson for anyone out there who
actually does this he had absolutely no reason at the end of the day to suspect any kind of
malware whatsoever from steams supposedly curated marketplace that exists right i mean i think we
all feel that way and the game appeared legitimate it was listed on the official platform that
literally millions of users trust every day for things like safe downloads and the malware
basically activated instantly as soon as he ran it block blasters was actually a crypto
drainer that was specifically engineered to target browser based wallets like phantom and
soul flare and the malicious code ended up scanning his installed browser extensions it
identified crypto wallet software and it extracted private keys from his local storage and within
minutes approximately 32 000 in his creator fees for his cancer meme coin vanished from his wallet
the crypto funds moved immediately through predictable laundering patterns that we usually see
the drainer basically transferred everything to an okay excellent wallet and basically liquidated
the cryptocurrency virtually instantly the entire thing was live stream was footage that was
captured that showed the kind of devastating moment when this actually happened with him
literally crying out i'm broke now um as a friend i think he was a friend attempted to
try to console him that's happening the crypto for you i understand this can be
very difficult because that money normally can help you for a lot of things in your life
but it's not the end okay
you're such a brave person
i am i'm broke and i'm no i'm i'm sorry guys
and this is like a dying man watching like an old dying man either like a young man
who's dying um literally watching his medical funds stolen in real time
while broadcasting to an audience that included his own brother who he had already sacrificed
everything his brother had already sacrificed everything to try to keep him alive and thieves
had specifically chosen basically to torture this dying man in order to extract his cancer
treatment money which really shows the nature of the beast that we're dealing with out there
the psychological impact on him was absolutely immediate and he was crushing the 32 000 represented
his life it was literally like seeing your life be taken from you for that organization is
probably pocket change right for this organized cyber crime op they're basically parasites who
had used his hope against him and stolen the funds that he needed to live and they elected to
inflict this maximum level of human suffering but then something really extraordinary began to happen
the internet started to become self aware so to speak word spread through the crypto community as
as a whole kind of faster than any government response would have defied downson who had known
rastilon tv for years immediately began trying to coordinate support efforts and the community
understood pretty much immediately what had actually happened and kind of started mobilizing resources
without actually waiting for you know institutional help because they knew it wasn't coming or
any kind of like bureaucratic approval which if you me and you got to watch my content
regularly that part of the story alone is pretty much to me really what makes this whole story
worth telling is people having self-sufficiency in their own communities it's absolutely amazing
zss becker or alex becker stepped up with the first as far as i know the first really
massive gesture when he donated thirty two thousand five hundred to actually replace the
stolen funds he basically covered the entire loss and then some for whatever extra treatment costs
actually existed and easy eats bodega contributed another ten thousand on top of that while sold
jakey and other crypto personalities basically began spreading the word and organizing additional
support across all of their networks that they had a rastilon tv successfully executed a community
takeover to redirect future creator rewards to secure devices and wallets that he had so his new
wallet address is here it'll also be listed in the pin comment below but basically the community
immediately began buying cancer tokens on top of everything else and this was specifically to
generate more creator fees for his actual treatment pushing the market cap to six hundred and thirty
two thousand through pure solidarity and this is a really cool story because it's not like a rug
poll we see so many of those it's so gross it's like the the disgusting hoe hop to a girl rug
pulling people then acting like a victim later on this is one where like people actually contribute
willingly and it's it's a really it's just it's a it's kind of a beautiful story right um and i
know this kind of sounds lame but it really kind of is in my opinion um and if any of you
were kind of watching this who were born in the 80s like this kind of thing might kind of sound
familiar to you right for those of you who are younger than that believe it or not like the
internet actually used to be a fairly community driven place much more than it is now where
it's predominantly echo chambers of anger and and would not um nowadays basically we see a lot of
sniping out there in terms of like people taking shots at each other on social media and i'm absolutely
one that's you know kill to you this a hundred percent uh but like back in the day in in my
opinion there was a lot more togetherness uh even with the internet being as decentralized
as it is with people all around the world i think that one of the best ways i've ever
heard this kind of nostalgic internet actually described was in Edward Snowden's book and when
i hear stories like this really it kind of immediately brings me back to those early days of
the internet where not every single thing was monetized like you can't even watch a review
anymore like the review for the product will have ads and it's just like it's absolutely insane um
anyways while the crypto community was replacing his stolen funds the real hunters were gearing
up right uh they were just getting started and when i say hunters i like don't mean the loser
thieves who actually researched him and and ended up robbing him i mean like the people that
are out there that in my opinion are worth their weight in gold are some of the best
ones that actually exist that's when i say hunters that we mean a vx underground who is
basically the cyber security collective that maintains the internet's largest malware connect
collection um immediately began reverse engineering the attack and this was in fact who i originally
had heard this story from and within hours over 50 malware researchers osin specialists and
cyber security professionals had actually mobilized for a coordinated decentralized investigation
how badass is that right like essentially the thieves had just really kicked the wrong hornet's
nest um and these researchers worked completely independently of corporations and governments
they hunt predators like this on kind of a regular basis because they refuse to watch
innocent people get destroyed dcy i said that there's some of the best people out there
right i think that was a fair description um anyone actually willing to stand up for
like the innocent or the people that are defenseless in my opinion are the ones that
we should be trying to elevate because those are the people that make us as a human species
just better quality altogether anyways the actual technical analysis really revealed
kind of the crude but effective nature of the actual attack block blasters used python and
bat files likely generated through something like chat gbt or a generic train as a service
platform these losers had basically hired a developer on telegram to create the games
facade right showing how kind of commercialized uh and accessible really targeted malware
distribution has become and for all of you out there sending me pdfs and sending me winks
and email um this is why i don't click anything this is like everything's containerized uh
anyways side issue the malware researchers though credit to them like quickly identified
specific file signatures the bot component for example had a certain hash and the game to
executable um another specific hash and they also discovered a fake virus total user named
zombie bunny who had actually attempted to try to legitimize the malware through false negative
reports that they had actually submitted the oscent specialists went to work tracking these
thieves on across multiple platforms and they analyzed the attack infrastructure through steam
accounts telegram channels and cryptocurrency wallet addresses and basically the thieves had
made a more than a few critical operational security mistakes that basically allowed
researchers to track their footprints back to their real world identities and within the span
of like a couple hours of the actual attack the investigators had actually identified the criminals
they had they had traced them back to telegram and and um steam identities uh to a few individuals
that were in argentina with more allegedly in the united states on a visa and the malware analysis
team basically extracted all the victim data from the trainer infrastructure they identified every
person who had been targeted by the same malware campaign um and they prepared notifications
for other potential victims and flagged all the malware samples across security platforms
their goal was basically in preventing future attacks while also gathering evidence about past
ones now this brings us to steam's response which demonstrated just the absolute worthlessness of
institutional security promises to a large degree um and the ability for trust to be
exploited fairly easily with things like that and despite receiving over 100 user complaints
about this malicious game valve's removal process moved at like a snail's pace or even worse a
bureaucratic speed while real users actually suffered real financial damage continually
and the game remained available for download while independent researchers did the actual work of
trying to protect users from these thieves and the volunteer research army basically achieved
results that no corporate security team or government agency could really match in terms
of speed and agility and they shared malware signatures across the entirety of the security
community they documented the attack they showed the patterns for future prevention
and uh they kind of created actionable intelligence that other researchers could
really use immediately um and this kind of voluntary collaboration between skilled individuals
really proved more effective than any kind of institutionalized cyber security response that
would have charged a ridiculous amount for um and been half as effective and that's because
their heart was in it really um and all of this kind of ended up really leading researchers to
discover similar malware threats in steam um specifically the steam workshop uh for games
like city skylines revealing abuse of vows platform for things like malware distribution
and the workshop system allows what's user generated content with even less oversight than
the main game catalog which really creates this kind of massive attack surface for thieves criminals
whatever um and throughout the years i've heard a ton of arguments against piracy with
the vast majority of those arguments being that when you when you buy a game as opposed to
download a copy of it i don't call it stealing and that there's a whole another
thing uh not that i pirate anything i don't pirate anything i would not pirate anything um because
yeah anyways the biggest argument that i tend to hear in regards to piracy is malware
well they put malware in the in pirated software and it's like not a lie it's true that does happen
but to me like that was one of the largest driving principles for people to actually
purchase games with that going it's anyways anyways in any case back to rastlin tv um he
basically recovered from the immediate technical damage and emotional damage obviously catastrophic
any security system properly and plan to continue his streaming which is awesome that's
awesome that he got back up on that bike um his go fund me actually remains active
for those who prefer those kind of traditional donation methods um and the combination of
the kind of rapid response from the crypto community and that kind of conventional fundraising
that we also see in in platforms now kind of really showed how decentralized and
centralized systems can in a way kind of complement each other which is very cool
like it's it's yet another factor that you kind of makes the story a great story in my opinion um
and the scumbags that actually thought that they could torture this cancer patient and disappear
anonymously backfired so like all in all i would say like the real lesson really kind of
transcends cryptocurrency and cyber security for that matter like at the core we really have to
remember that the humanity that exists that much of the time is still behind that keyboard
there's still a human behind there right when we see these institutions fail repeatedly to protect
people which is absolutely the norm nowadays it's really amazing to see voluntary communities of
talented people can still succeed through rapid coordination anger kind of specialized
expertise steam security has proven itself to be absolutely worthless law enforcement i would
argue is on par with steam security they're going to be absolutely worthless and useless hopefully
i'm wrong about that they actually because i don't think it's right that anyone gets robbed
especially someone in that position law enforcement probably won't do anything about it
mainly because they have sheeple to ride speeding tickets to and soft extort it's a lot easier than
tracking people down and actually solving real crimes but it was cool to see community action
provided actual help to the victim and actual consequences for the attackers through this
kind of exposure and investigation and innovation of everyone coming together a dying man basically
got robbed by parasites who specifically targeted his cancer treatment money and within hours the
internet's most skilled researchers had pretty much hunted down these douchebags who had stolen
these funds and in doing that they protected other potential victims and these attackers
kind of chose their victim thinking that this dude was going to be weak and desperate and that
makes him an easy target and while they were right about that they discovered that instead of
targeting someone the community cares about that actually makes you a really big target
for the people people that are far more dangerous than they were or any government agency was
for that matter I would argue more capable too because they actually got the job done in like a
day all right so in any case thanks for watching to the end guys I really appreciate your support
and I'll see you in the next video