As with anything, I'm going to reserve judgment until I know more. Which is difficult, because this stuff is complicated, and not all of the evidence is probably known at this point.
I believe the idea of tricking automated bots into making stupid trades is neither immoral nor should it be illegal. Anyone who employs such bots should be in that "caveat emptor" situation where using something that you don't understand and where it can be tricked is your own folly.
That said, I did a little more digging and found this, which appears to be something analyzing the transaction LONG before legal action was taken and thus is a piece of analysis that I wouldn't say is tainted by DOJ/prosecutorial bias: https://blockworks.co/news/validator-frontruns-mev-bots
MEV relays are formed by two parties: proposers and builders. Proposers make bids on transactions, and builders secure the highest bid and generate blocks containing their transactions. They then send the blocks to validators, who will approve the transaction.
“One of the core ideas behind Proposer-Builder Separation is that proposers cannot be allowed to see the contents of the block they’re signing until they’ve signed the block,” a research analyst at Paradigm who goes by samczsun said in a tweet. “Theoretically, this makes it extremely hard for a malicious proposer to deconstruct bundles.” As for this weekend’s $25 million sandwich attack: Eighteen days earlier, the exploiter deposited 32 ETH ($57,500) to become a validator. This meant the exploiter was a proposer who could also reorder block transactions.
It’s likely that once they were able to propose a block as a validator, the attacker included additional transactions that weren’t initially inside the block made by the builder.
This starts to become a little more murky. It seems more akin to a collusion where someone is hired to be a company's attorney and is in cahoots with someone who wants to open a contract with said company. The contract that is offered is a sweetheart deal to get the company interested, and then the lawyer they assume they could trust and is acting in their best interest hides several terrible provisions in the contract that cost the company millions. Then after the contract is signed, the lawyer quits and makes off with their partner and the loot.
It seems to be a case where the transaction offered to the bot was one the bot would ordinarily accept and profit from. The transaction then goes to the "validator" which supposedly should be a neutral third party, but the validator changed the terms of the transaction to something worthless. It seems the brothers were both the fox and the henhouse's guard dog.
IMHO
if that's an accurate summary, that at least gets into the
immoral category, although it's unclear whether it would even be illegal and successfully prosecutable.
That said, as I said at the beginning, this is all highly complicated and technical stuff, and the mechanics of crypto trading is not something I can say I truly understand.
