Ex-PumpFun developer faces up to seven years in prison for hacking into the $2 million platform

What’s new? The former senior developer of PumpFun, leading launchpad in the Solana ecosystem, Jarrett Dunn, has been placed in a London jail for violating his bail conditions. This remand will remain in place until the start of the hearing in the case in which Dunn is charged with stealing PumpFun funds.

Material by Decrypt

What else is known? Dunn, who is a Canadian citizen, worked at PumpFun for about six weeks and withdrew about two million dollars from the platform during that time.

He had previously pleaded guilty to fraud by abuse of position, as well as transferring the proceeds of crime. However, at a hearing last October, when sentencing was to be announced, Dunn moved to withdraw the guilty plea, causing his attorneys to withdraw from the case.

He now awaits a hearing on a motion to withdraw the guilty plea, which the court may reject. Dunn had been living in London for most of that time, but suddenly moved to Liverpool in early June. At the time, he noted in a comment to the media that he preferred Liverpool because of its “emptiness.”

With this move, Dunn violated his bail conditions, which restricted his freedom of movement and controlled it with an ankle bracelet. As a result, Dunn was sent to Walton Prison in Liverpool before being transferred to Pentonville in London in July.

“Bail was denied a couple of times and I may just stick with a guilty plea and serve my time and earn a couple of degrees. Zero rap3s, zero beatings, food is great, and a lot cheaper than living on my own,” he wrote in X.

Source: X

Dunn's information for his social media accounts came through a friend, Mark Kelly. The latter noted that Dunn is “remarkably cool and zenlike considering his situation.”

The developer was taken into custody just as PumpFun was preparing for its $600 million initial coin offering (ICO) of the PUMP native token. Shortly after the launch, the asset was ranked 68th in the overall cryptocurrency rankings by market capitalization.

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Before Dunn’s attack, PumpFun was already a popular platform, but was only gaining momentum. However, the launchpad had already attracted a lot of negative attention due to the abundance of Pump&Dump scams and thrash content in the stream section for token creators.

When Dunn withdrew $2 million from the platform and sent tokens to random addresses, supporters called him the Robin Hood of the cryptocurrency world, although regular traders were also affected by his actions.

After the attack, Dunn claimed in a stream on Platform X that he wanted to take PumpFun down before it did more damage.

Dunn’s controversial efforts didn’t come to fruition: PumpFun continued to gain popularity, and its revenue grew from $43,9 million at the time of the attack to $770 million in July, according to Dune. PumpFun was at the epicenter of the meme coin craze and helped create popular assets such as Moo Deng, Chill Guy, and Fartcoin, but also many controversial projects.