A 23-YEAR-OLD PLEADED GUILTY TO ALL 31 COUNTS AFTER POSING AS COINBASE SUPPORT, EMPTYING NEARLY 100 ACCOUNTS OF $15.9 MILLION, AND LOSING $6 MILLION OF IT GAMBLING

Ronald Spektor, 23, was sentenced on September 23, 2026 to four to twelve years. He pleaded guilty to all 31 counts, including first-degree money laundering, first-degree grand larceny and first-degree criminal possession of stolen property. The case came from Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez’s office. Total taken: $15,944,000, from nearly 100 Coinbase users.

The method had no technical part at all. He called people, said he was Coinbase support, sometimes using the name James Wilson, and told them hackers had their account. Then he told them to move everything somewhere safe. The safe place was his. He posted about it on Telegram under the handle lolimfeelingevil, and he lost about $6 million of the money gambling.

Read the mechanism again, because it is the whole lesson. Nothing was hacked. No key was broken, no exchange was breached, no code failed. Ninety-odd people were told by a voice on the phone to move their coins, and they moved them. The attack surface was the belief that a company calls you.

The Brooklyn DA’s office put the defence in one sentence: Coinbase and most companies will never call customers or ask them to move crypto to a safe wallet. That is free and it works. Spektor forfeits over $500,000 and owes restitution of nearly $16 million, which tells you how much of it is actually coming back. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $84,186.