United States federal agents have arrested and indicted two men for stealing a whopping $230 million of Bitcoin from a Washington, D.C. resident believed to be a creditor of Genesis.
On Sept. 19, the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia reported that two men, Malone Lam and Jeandiel Serrano, were arrested and charged with conspiracy to steal and launder over 4,100 Bitcoin (BTC), worth $230 million at the time, from an unnamed victim in the country’s capital.
The pair used several online aliases and sophisticated methods to access the victim’s accounts, transfer funds and launder the proceeds since at least August.
Lam and Serrano reportedly spent their ill-gotten gains on a lavish lifestyle, including international travel, nightclubs, luxury vehicles, watches, jewelry, designer handbags and rental homes in Los Angeles and Miami.
Stealing $230 million in BTC from just one person
Blockchain sleuth “ZachXBT” assisted law enforcement in what he described as a “highly sophisticated social engineering attack” in a post on X on Sept. 19. He also identified a third suspect, known by the alias “Wiz.”
Source: ZachXBT
The onchain investigator elaborated that the scammers targeted a single Genesis creditor on Aug. 19.
Genesis filed for bankruptcy in January 2023 following exposure to FTX and secured court approval to return $3 billion in cash and crypto to its creditors in May.
The men posed as Google Support via a fake phone number to compromise the victim’s personal accounts. They then called, posing as Gemini exchange support, claiming the account had been hacked and convinced the victim to reset two-factor authentication (2FA) before sending the Gemini funds to a compromised wallet.
They also persuaded the victim to run screen-sharing software, from which they obtained the victim’s private Bitcoin keys.
An initial tracing showed as much as $243 million in crypto was split multiple ways between each party before funds “quickly peeled off to more than 15 exchanges immediately swapping back and forth between Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, and Monero,” he added.
Path of stolen crypto. Source: ZachXBT
A follow-up investigation found that a cluster of Ethereum addresses linked to Serrano and “Wiz” received over $41 million from two exchanges in recent weeks.
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ZachXBT said that with the assistance of crypto forensic investigators, Web3 security firm zeroShadow and the Binance Security Team, “more than $9 million has been frozen, and $500,000 has already been returned back after working closely with the victim to investigate the incident.”
The Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said the investigation is ongoing, with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Washington Field Office and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Washington Field Office.
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