CZ sentenced and SBF’s deal: April’s crypto crime round-up

Do Kwon remains in the tug of war between the United States and South Korea. Meanwhile, prosecutors continue to crack down on crypto mixers.

April has been a pretty big month when it comes to crypto crimes.

Where else to start than Changpeng Zhao, who was sentenced to four months in prison after enabling money laundering at Binance?

He will now be the richest man ever sent to prison – but critics claim there has been a “horrible miscarriage of justice” given prosecutors have been searching for three years.

This is in stark contrast to the 25-year prison sentence handed down to hapless entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried.

This month we learned that SBF has agreed to help investors in FTX, the company it bankrupted, pursue lawsuits against celebrities who support the stock market.

The turn of events becomes strange, especially considering that the CEO once had a role in hiring them.

And that could rub salt in the wound for the likes of NFL legend Tom Brady, who reportedly lost $30 million when his trading platform crashed spectacularly.

Also, during the roll call of fallen crypto heavyweights, there has been a lot going on with Do Kwon lately.

The Terraform Labs co-founder fled after the explosion of two cryptocurrencies wiped $40 billion from the market and was arrested in Montenegro last year while trying to fly to Dubai using a fake passport.

Kwon is caught in the middle of a tug of war between the United States and his native South Korea, which have made competing extradition requests to face criminal charges.

But the end result was all sorts of legal ping-ponging that prevented a flight from taking off.

Meanwhile, the civil lawsuit against Kwon and Terraform Labs in New York continues apace; The jury finds them guilty of fraud charges. The Securities and Exchange Commission is now seeking a massive $5.3 billion penalty.

We also report on numerous other arrests and convictions.

Social media influencer Jabara Igbara (also known as Jay Mazini) was sentenced to seven years in prison for stealing more than $8 million from Muslims through a crypto fraud scheme.

Prosecutors portrayed him as a “con artist” who pretended to be successful on Instagram, deceiving unsuspecting victims and gambling away his ill-gotten gains.

Jay Mazini | Source: Instagram

The US Department of Justice also continued its relentless campaign against cryptocurrency mixers with charges against Samourai Wallet founders Keonne Rodriguez and William Lonergan Hill.

This all relates to fears that such tools are being used by malicious actors to launder money and evade sanctions, and if convicted, Rodriguez could face 20 years behind bars.

Samourai Wallet’s website has now been taken down and now looks like this:

Samourai Wallet website hacked | Source: US DOJ Oh, there are so many hacks.

There were also a few exploits worth mentioning.

A trader lost more than $180,000 in cryptocurrency after falling victim to a phishing attack on Ethereum, with his wallet emptied in just 50 minutes.

Meanwhile, El Salvador’s state-controlled Bitcoin wallet “Chivo” suffered a second data breach when malicious actors leaked source code and VPN credentials for ATMs.

Earlier this month, personal information of five million Salvadorans – a 144GB trove of data – was also exposed online.

CiberInteligenciaSV Telegram post | Source: Telegram

A 71-year-old digital artist in India fell victim to scammers pretending to be interested in his NFTs.

It’s also bad news for an investor who lost an eye-watering $800,000 due to two malicious Google Chrome extensions; amid fears that these add-ons actually contain keyloggers. The victim known as “Oversell” on X wrote:

“This is a costly $800k mistake; the lesson is that if it looks bad enough to prompt you to enter a seed, then wipe the entire computer first.”

Sell ​​by Expiration Date on X

And there continued to be numerous attacks targeting high-profile accounts on social media.

Spider-Man star Tom Holland, who has seven million followers on X, saw his account taken over by attackers who falsely promoted “SPIDER” tokens and Spiderverse NFTs.

While the fake posts claimed that the digital assets were launched with Binance, they linked to a fraudulent website.

In a particularly strange (and unusual) development, it also appears that the hacker may have uploaded a selfie to the celebrity’s account.