tl;dr
Two men, Malone Lam and Jeandiel Serrano, have been charged with stealing approximately $230 million in Bitcoin. They allegedly gained access to the victim's account and took 4,100 Bitcoin, which they used to buy luxury items and real estate. The Department of Justice stated that the suspects used a...
Two men, Malone Lam and Jeandiel Serrano, have been charged with stealing approximately $230 million in Bitcoin. They allegedly gained access to the victim's account and took 4,100 Bitcoin, which they used to buy luxury items and real estate. The Department of Justice stated that the suspects used a crypto mixer to conceal the movement of funds. The arrests were made in Miami and Los Angeles, and the defendants will appear in court in Florida and California.
The investigation was aided by a pseudonymous crypto sleuth named ZachXBT, who claimed that the defendants used a sophisticated social engineering attack to access the Bitcoin. Feds today hit two men with criminal charges for allegedly stealing approximately $230 million in Bitcoin from someone, and then using a crypto mixer to hide the movement of funds. In the highly complicated scam, two defendants—Malone Lam, 20, of Miami, Florida and Los Angeles, California; and Jeandiel Serrano, 21, of Los Angeles—allegedly gained access to the victim's account to take 4,100 Bitcoin. They then spent it on luxury cars, watches, and real estate, the Department of Justice (DOJ) alleged Thursday.
Pseudonymous crypto sleuth ZachXBT said on Twitter (aka X) that he helped with the investigation leading to the arrest of the two suspects in what he called "a highly sophisticated social engineering attack."
As a result of the investigation Box and Greavys were arrested yesterday > evening in Miami and LA. I would expect law enforcement seized additional funds during the arrests due to large transfers around that period of time. ZachXBT alleged in a thread on the social media platform that the two defendants called a creditor of collapsed crypto exchange Genesis pretending to be representatives of Google Support. They then conned the victim into resetting their two-factor authentication credential in order to access the Bitcoin received from Genesis, ZachXBT further alleged.
Genesis was a crypto lender that went bankrupt in 2022. It has since worked out a repayment plan to give back funds to former users. The men in this case allegedly put the stolen funds through crypto mixers—apps that obfuscate the movement of funds—to cover their tracks, ZachXBT and the DOJ both claimed.
Authorities arrested Lam and Serrano yesterday, the DOJ said. They will appear in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida and the Central District of California on Thursday.