Helium Bar — A Crypto Fraud which stole Millions Across Continents
By: K S
Tags: Cryptocurrency News, Fraud, Cryptocurrency, Helium Network

Just as the people across North America were getting ready for celebrating Labor day on September 6th, the fraudsters behind Helium Bar (now defunct website: https://helium.bar/) were executing their Rug Pull Ghost Protocol. They had planned and executed well for a little over a month by promising and also paying some daily Helium Network Token (HNT) rewards to its customers who purchased their Helium Network Mining plans from their website. But right after coming back from the Labor Day break, they shut down their website, stopped replying to any emails and needless to say fled with at least 5 Million USD in payments from its fast growing customer base of over 23,000 people from different countries.

They started sometime in late July, 2021 with press releases on different crypto oriented news sites — Bitcoin.com, Worldcryptotimes, Thehackpost, Coinworldstory, Einnews, NativeNewspost, and various other unsuspecting online outlets. Some of these outlets quickly took down those press releases when they were made aware of the situation.

In the press releases they claimed to own and run a network of Helium Hotspots providing LoRaWAN network coverage on Stuttgart’s Free Radio Network Freifunk. They even used Freifunk’s Stuttgart, Germany address in their promotion emails. Later when people associated with Freifunk were contacted, they were equally dumbfounded and immediately filed a police complaint against Helium Bar.

A quick primer on Helium Network: Helium Hotspots provide a wireless network (LoRaWAN) for IoT devices. And people who have deployed or run these hotspots get rewarded daily through Helium Network Tokens (HNT) on the Helium Blockchain. This is one of the fastest growing wireless networks around the world with a very high Return on Investment to the people who run the hotspots. As of today HNT coin has an exchange price of 20.5 USD. But as we are living through a period of the Great Semiconductor Shortage, these hotspots are also in short-supply and backordered with a wait time of over 3–5 months. Their demand is so high that many people are selling these hotspots on eBay and other online channels for 4 to 8 times of their regular price.

Helium Bar Fraudsters came up with the scheme at the perfect time and exploited and got better of the people’s risk return nature. They offered different plans which were supposed to run for 365 days. Helium Bar will pay back a portion of rewards from their already existing network to the customers based on their purchased plans. And claimed to invest the people’s money to expand their network with new hotspots. A quick peek into the wallets owned by Helium Bar on the Helium Network Blockchain also indicated that the Helium Bar fraudsters were regularly receiving HNT rewards from active hotspots accounts in USA and Europe. This activity coupled with the lure of daily rewards dragged customers deeper into the scam.

References: You can see some of these plans here from their web archive (https://web.archive.org/web/20210803095149/https://www.helium.bar/)

Helium Bar — Hotspot Plans

Conned victims list runs in over 23,000 as of today with more and more victims coming forward and sharing the details on this scam. Helium Bar took most payments in cryptocurrency (e.g. Ethereum, Bitcoin, USDC, USDT, DAI, LiteCoin, etc.) through payment gateways like Coinbase Commerce or directly through exchanges like Binance, Coinbase , Coinpayments, or the customers’ cryptocurrency Digital Wallets. Credit cards were also used in the first few days of operation. Interestingly, it was later found that those credit card payments went to a Rental Car Company in Hamburg, Germany.

Helium Bar fraudsters not only scammed their customers but also exploited platforms like NameCheap (domain hosting), Mailchimp (email marketing), Intercom (chat support), Coinbase Commerce (payment gateway), CoinPayments (payment gateway), TrustPilot (online reviews) and the news outlets named earlier to run their criminal act. These companies have been contacted to provide further information and clear their names. Needless to say, criminal complaints have also been filed by the victims in different countries and also with FBI’s IC3 (Internet Crime Complaint Center).

If you or someone known to you has been scammed by Helium Bar, please reach out to your local Cyber crime authorities and report the crime. With your collective effort and power of social media, scammers cannot hide for long.