Security Researcher Warns of Chilling Effect After Feds Search Phone at Airport

upstart writes:

Security researcher warns of chilling effect after feds search phone at airport:

A U.S. security researcher is warning of a chilling effect after he was detained on arrival at a U.S. airport, his phone was searched, and was ordered to testify to a grand jury, only to have prosecutors reverse course and drop the investigation later.

On Wednesday, Sam Curry, a security engineer at blockchain technology company Yuga Labs, said in a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, that he was taken into secondary inspection by U.S. federal agents on September 15 after returning from a trip to Japan. Curry said agents with the Internal Revenue Service's Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI) unit and the Department of Homeland Security questioned him at Dulles International Airport in Washington DC about a "high profile phishing campaign," searched his unlocked phone, and served him with a grand jury subpoena to testify in New York the week after.

According to a photo of the subpoena that Curry posted, the grand jury was investigating wire fraud and money laundering.

But Curry said he later received confirmation that the copy of his device data was deleted and the grand jury subpoena was canceled once prosecutors realized that Curry was investigating the theft of crypto, and not involved in it.

In a post, Curry said that in December 2022 he discovered that scammers had inadvertently exposed their Ethereum private key in the source code of a phishing website that had stolen millions of dollars worth of crypto. Curry said he imported the key to his own crypto wallet to see if there was anything left in the alleged scammers' wallet, but that he found the key "five minutes too late and the stolen assets were gone."

Curry said he was "on my home IP address and obviously not attempting to conceal my identity as I was simply investigating this."

"We normally take this approach where it's seeing if there's anything we can do to help. And then if we can't, obviously we can't. It's tricky, because there are so many of these phishing campaigns," Curry told TechCrunch in a phone call.

Curry said that the feds had requested the authorization logs from crypto marketplace OpenSea, which Curry used to check the contents of the scammers' wallet. Those logs included Curry's home IP address. Curry accused the feds of using his arrival to the U.S. "as an excuse to ask for my device and summon me to a grand jury, rather than just email me or something."

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