Three Years On, a Crypto Whale Dangles a 20% AI Bounty: "My $42M is Hiding. Go Fetch."

Fenbushi Capital co-founder Bo Shen is putting a multi-million dollar carrot on a very long stick, publicly offering a 10-20% bounty to anyone who can help claw back the roughly $42 million in crypto looted from his personal wallet back in November 2022. It's the ultimate "finders, keepers a portion" deal.

This March 26 announcement breathes new, AI-powered life into one of crypto's most infamous individual heist narratives. Shen notes that while the digital paper trail has been followed for over three years, the paths the assets took are finally coming into sharper focus—like a blurry NFT slowly resolving on a high-res screen.

The original digital mugging went down on November 10, 2022, when attackers somehow got their hands on the seed phrase for Shen's Trust Wallet. The haul, as confirmed by security firm SlowMist at the time, was enough to make any degen weep: approximately $38.2 million in USDC, 1,607 ETH, nearly 720,000 USDT, and 4.13 BTC. That's not a portfolio; it's a retirement plan for a small island nation.

Shen was quick to clarify that the pilfered stack was strictly personal, with no connection to Fenbushi Capital's treasury. He gave a shoutout to on-chain detectives ZachXBT and Taylor 'Tayvano' Monahan, alongside firms Bitrace and SlowMist, for their relentless digging. He also dropped the tidbit that ZachXBT and Tayvano had already helped freeze about $1.2 million in linked assets—a nice start, but still just the loose change from the couch cushions of this heist.

The reward, Shen stated, will be paid upon successful recovery. "Any individual or organization that makes a substantive contribution to asset recovery — regardless of identity, background, or method — will receive 10%–20% of the total recovered amount, based on the level of contribution," he declared. It's a meritocratic bounty for the age of anonymous avatars; your KYC is your on-chain IQ.

Shen pointed out that the tools of the trade have evolved from blunt instruments to surgical scalpels since 2022. "Three years ago, when the incident occurred, the tools for on-chain tracking and security investigations were far less mature than they are today," he noted. Back then, tracing was like following breadcrumbs; now it's more like having a satellite tag on every crumb.

He's essentially framing this bounty as a high-stakes stress test for the new generation of crypto forensics. Whether the full $42 million can be rounded up after three years of being shuffled through the blockchain's laundry remains the million-dollar—or rather, forty-two-million-dollar—question. This public offer, however, is a bold bet that today's tracing tech might finally be sharp enough to cut through the anonymity and close the ledger on one of crypto's costliest mysteries.