Rubin's Reubens: An Embezzlement Scheme of Massive Proportions

Written by Benjamin Bitcoin

A startling secret has been uncovered about the Rubin’s Reubens Collective. After Shinobi accidentally sent a direct message on X as a tweet discussing an embezzlement scheme and plans to open a sandwich shop, the Bugle did some good ol’ fashioned investigative journalism. 

The size and scope of the scheme is truly vast. For years the Rubin’s Reubens have been defrauding multiple open source grant providers in the Bitcoin ecosystem, embezzling multiple bitcoin while producing fake and fraudulent research and Bitcoin tools. The number of Bitcoiners who have fell victim to this fraud is massive, and frankly scary that a group of actors were able to pull off a scheme of this scope for so long undetected before Shinobi’s gaff on X. (Editors Note: his tweet has yet to be deleted) 

Due to the sheer size of the fraud, a comprehensive list would be too large to post in a single article, but to give our readers an idea of the magnitude of the scheme we are going to list a few of the biggest examples. 

Callebtc: Calle is a member of the Collective who has kept his association completely hidden from the public. He has defrauded numerous grant providers, including the Human Rights Foundation, Strike, and OpenSats. While ostensibly funded to work on a chaumian ecash implementation, in reality all he has produced is a small Python script that spits out random numbers when provided with random numbers. Cashu doesn’t actually provide any privacy, just gibberish numbers, and places no restrictions on withdrawing funds from the “mint’s” Lightning node. Any user can come along and withdraw as much bitcoin as they want. 

Rene Pickhardt: Rene isn’t even a real person, he is the product of a combination of deepfake AI technology and a low budget replication of Hollywood mask special effects. The German nationality was chosen due to the ease with which low budget Fiverr voice actors can replicate a German accent. This clearly explains why his research on Lightning Network liquidity and payment routing is so hard to understand, it’s literally just made up gibberish. We believe a 2nd grade Chinese math student was paid to fabricate the research on Fiverr. Rene helped to defraud BitMEX’s grant progam. 

Ruben Somsen: A resident of South Korea, who has for many years longed for Western culinary experiences again, was immediately intrigued by the Rubin’s Reubens plan. On the condition that the sandwhich shop would open a franchise in Korea, Ruben himself devised the brilliant plan of simply coming up with ideas for things you could in theory do with Bitcoin with new softforks without actually building anything. Ruben’s plan was used to funnel money from SpiralBTC’s development grant fund. 

Jeremy Rubin: The Bugle was unable to definitively verify this plot originated with Jeremy, but the name of the group and sandwich shop hints at a significant contribution to the plan. Jeremy of course is the creator of CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY. After coding the proposal, which is simply hashing something using SHA256, in the span of five minutes, Jeremy went on to collect a $50,000 grant from BitMEX to go on a multi-year tour convincing everyone that hashing things is the most conservative yet powerful breakthrough in Bitcoin development since Bitcoin itself was invented. He did no more development work after the initial five minutes in 2019. 

There are numerous other examples of lesser publicly known developers involved in the scheme, but Bugle estimates on the amount of funds collected through the fraud are somewhere between 25-30% of the entire grant pool of the ecosystem over the last 4-5 years. 

When contacted for a statement, the Rubin’s Reubens said only that they intend to accept Bitcoin only from wallets using CHECKTEMPLATEVERIFY in an attempt to make good on their claims to be acting to encourage adoption of the Bitcoin feature.