‘Salomon Brothers’ returns — with a $279B bitcoin dusting scheme

Legal notices apparently from self-proclaimed investment firm “Salomon Brothers” were sent to over 39,000 bitcoin (BTC) addresses earlier this year in an attempt to repossess 2.3 million in dormant coins worth over $279 billion.

That’s according to a report from Galaxy Research, which analyzed the campaign that involved an unknown Salomon client “dusting” notices en masse between July and August.

The tactic involves sending tiny amounts of BTC to thousands of addresses with the notice in an “OP_RETURN output.” It threatened the address owners with “constructive possession” of its BTC via legal remedies if they didn’t respond to its notice or prove the address wasn’t abandoned.

Oddly, one of the OP_RETURN messages linked to a test transaction read, “Thank you for giving birth to me. Now you get real money back.”

Salomon claims it’s protecting BTC

Salomon is reportedly representing its client “altruistically,” and doesn’t want to “adversely impact the crypto market,” or claim ownership over wallets that aren’t actually abandoned.

It claims to want to safeguard the Bitcoin network, and suggested that dormant BTC is vulnerable to “rogue states” who may seek to illegally access it by exploiting “older encryption protocols.”

However, Galaxy Research notes this claim is weak as its dusting spree only targeted “P2PKH” addresses, which aren’t as vulnerable to a quantum computing attack as P2PK addresses are.

Galaxy concluded that Salomon may be trying a novel legal theory to claim the BTC, and that it might be trying “to establish notice onchain and prepare a record to support potential litigation.”

Read more: Was the largest BTC sale in history linked to a 2011 exchange hack?

“While the legal viability and possible reach of the Salomon client’s potential claims on abandoned property are questionable, the dusting campaign shouldn’t be dismissed outright as a pure behavioural experiment,” it said.

Protos previously reported that Salomon Brothers and its methods were comparable to a phishing campaign, and that its site raised a number of red flags from unwanted downloads to grammatical errors.

Salomon was originally a prominent investment firm in the 1910s. Since then, the trademarked name has changed hands several times, and Galaxy reports that it’s now under the ownership of a group of “self-described Salomon Brothers alumni” who were likely behind the campaign.