sentenced

According to the City of London Police report, 25-year-old London man Ajay Shinjin (also known as AJ Marley Cruz) was sentenced to two and a half years in prison by the Inner London Crown Court for his involvement in a SIM swap fraud case. He pleaded guilty on September 28 to two charges of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation and transferring criminal property. The case involved the theft of cryptocurrency worth nearly £200,000 (approximately $265,000).In early November 2021, British telecom operator BT discovered unauthorized activity in its systems, where customers' phone numbers were transferred to SIM cards controlled by criminals, who intercepted one-time verification codes sent by banks and cryptocurrency platforms. The police identified several suspects based on device data provided by BT, and Shinjin was linked to four of the devices. He profited over £44,000, which he used for a vacation in Dubai, a luxury apartment in Canary Wharf, and a gold-plated dental grill.Details of the case revealed that one victim lost approximately £40,000 in cryptocurrency on November 2, 2021, with about £27,000 flowing into Shinjin's personal crypto account; a second victim had approximately £17,000 entirely transferred to his wallet; he also assisted in stealing about £8,000 from a third victim's Coinbase account and around £130,000 from a fourth victim. Shinjin was first arrested at his residence in 2021 and was re-arrested at Heathrow Airport upon returning from Dubai in October 2023.

The co-founder of the dark web market Empire Market, Raheim Hamilton, was sentenced to 40 years in federal prison and fined $5 million on October 5 in Chicago. His plea agreement covers approximately 1,230 bitcoins, 24.4 ethers, and three properties in Virginia.Empire Market operated from 2018 to 2020, facilitating over 4 million transactions between buyers and sellers, with a transaction volume exceeding $430 million. Investigators seized digital assets, cash, and precious metals worth $75 million in the case. The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) stated that the platform required buyers and sellers to conduct transactions exclusively in cryptocurrency and encouraged the use of mixing services and encrypted communication. Buyers could also rate the effectiveness of sellers in hiding drug packages, with drug sales involved amounting to nearly $375 million.

A former core infrastructure engineer, Daniel Rhyne, from an industrial company in New Jersey, was sentenced to 32 months in prison for attacking his employer's computer network and demanding a ransom in Bitcoin. The 59-year-old Rhyne, who is from Kansas City, Missouri, was sentenced on September 28 by U.S. District Judge Michael A. Shipp in Trenton. He pleaded guilty in April this year to charges including extortion by threatening to damage a protected computer and intentionally damaging a protected computer. The prosecution did not disclose the name of the company, which is headquartered in Somerset County, New Jersey, serving clients in industries ranging from biopharmaceuticals to oil and gas.According to the FBI's criminal complaint, around 4 PM on November 25, 2023, the company's network administrator began receiving hundreds of password reset notifications for accounts, and subsequently discovered that all other domain administrator accounts had been deleted. Forty-four minutes later, employees received an email titled "Your Network Has Been Penetrated," claiming that the company's IT administrator had been locked out, backups had been deleted, and warning that unless 20 Bitcoins (approximately $750,000 at the time) were paid by December 2, an additional 40 servers would be shut down daily for 10 days. The ransom was set at 700,000 euros, to be paid in Bitcoin.Investigators traced the attack back to an unauthorized virtual machine created on the company network on November 9, 2023, with the password "TheFr0zenCrew!", which was subsequently set for the administrator account, 301 user accounts, and the email used to send the ransom note.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California stated that a 26-year-old man, Adam Iza, who calls himself the "Godfather," has been sentenced to 78 months in prison and must pay $23.4 million in restitution. He pleaded guilty in January 2025 to charges of conspiracy to violate rights, wire fraud, and tax evasion, and has been in custody since September 2024. This sentence will run concurrently with the 15-year sentence he received last month for an attempted Bitcoin robbery, which will not increase his actual time served.From August 2021 to April 2022, Iza hired off-duty Los Angeles County police officers as private security and admitted to conspiring with them to obtain law enforcement confidential records and personal data of individuals he had disputes with, obtaining court-authorized search warrants to track these individuals, and having the officers intimidate and threaten them. The Department of Justice stated that five former officers have been convicted for working for him, including 42-year-old Eric Chase Saavedra, who set up a security company providing these officers, and was sentenced to 21 months; 45-year-old Michael David Coberg, who assisted in extorting rivals and arranged false drug arrests, is serving a 63-month sentence. The prosecution wrote in the sentencing memorandum that wealthy individuals cannot buy "search warrants, arrests, badges, or guns" for private disputes.In another fraud case, since December 2020, Iza gained access to a Meta Business Manager account and its associated credit line, reselling it to advertising companies, with Meta clients being charged for ads they never purchased. After discovering this, Meta refunded the clients and absorbed the losses.

According to Decrypt, the UK's Crown Prosecution Service obtained a confiscation order under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, requiring 44-year-old Paul Chowles, a former officer of the National Crime Agency (NCA) from Bristol, to repay £1,810,678.93, approximately $2.4 million.This amount is related to the 50 bitcoins he stole, which were worth about £60,000, or approximately $77,000, when he took them in 2017. Of the 50 bitcoins, 30 have been recovered, and the Crown Prosecution Service attributes the difference between the two amounts to the appreciation of bitcoin since 2017.Chowles was involved in the NCA's investigation of the dark web market Silk Road 2, responsible for analyzing and extracting cryptocurrency from the devices involved. In May 2017, he transferred 50 bitcoins from Thomas White's reserve wallet over two days, splitting them into smaller amounts and transferring them through the bitcoin mixing service Bitcoin Fog, and cashed out a total of £144,580 through 279 transactions using Cryptopay and Wirex debit cards.For years, this theft was attributed to White, who has always denied it, and by the end of 2021, the missing bitcoins were listed as untraceable. In 2022, devices containing private keys were found during a search of Chowles' residence, and the Merseyside police, with the assistance of Chainalysis, traced the flow of funds.

Former Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Eric Saavedra was sentenced to 21 months in prison. The court found that he used law enforcement databases to assist a cryptocurrency trader in carrying out a extortion scheme.In addition to the prison sentence, Saavedra was also ordered to pay $90,984 in restitution, related to his concealment of $373,146 in income from the Internal Revenue Service.

According to the Brooklyn District Attorney's Office, 23-year-old Brooklyn man Ronald Spektor was sentenced to 4 to 12 years in prison for committing phishing and social engineering fraud. Over approximately one year, Spektor impersonated Coinbase customer service, luring about 100 American users to transfer cryptocurrency to wallets under his control, claiming "accounts were hacked and assets were at risk," stealing nearly 15.94 million dollars in total.Subsequently, he laundered the money through multiple exchanges, mixing services, and cryptocurrency gambling platforms. On September 2, he pleaded guilty to all 31 charges, including first-degree money laundering and first-degree grand larceny, and was ordered to forfeit cash, cryptocurrency, and personal property valued at over 500,000 dollars, while also needing to pay restitution of nearly 16 million dollars. Investigations revealed that he had publicly flaunted his criminal gains on platforms like Telegram.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Iris Rabaya Au, a 37-year-old woman from Irvine, Orange County, California, was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison for failing to report over $2.6 million in illegal income to the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). She was also ordered to pay $1.484 million in restitution and had multiple luxury cars, high-performance vehicles, designer handbags, and three "Godfather" sculptures confiscated. Au is the ex-girlfriend of cryptocurrency scammer Adam Iza.Prosecutors stated that between 2020 and 2024, Iza fraudulently obtained Meta advertising accounts and credit lines, selling account access and earning millions of dollars in unreported income. At Iza's direction, Au set up shell companies and opened bank accounts, using the related funds to pay approximately $1 million to Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department (LASD) officers and to purchase or lease luxury homes, cars, jewelry, and clothing. They also spent nearly $10 million on entertainment and purchased about $16 million in cryptocurrency for Iza. Between 2020 and 2023, Au transferred over $2.6 million into her personal bank accounts but did not accurately report it on her federal tax returns. She pleaded guilty to one count of false tax return in March 2025. Iza pleaded guilty in January 2025 to charges including conspiracy to infringe rights, wire fraud, and tax evasion, with a sentencing hearing scheduled for October 5. He was also sentenced to 15 years in federal prison for his involvement in an attempted Bitcoin robbery and kidnapping case in Connecticut in August 2024.

According to CriptoNoticias, a court in Costa Rica sentenced two men to 12 years in prison each for money laundering. The case involves the kidnapping and murder of American businessman William Shawn Crichton Kopko in 2018, for which his family paid a ransom of approximately 148 bitcoins, valued at around 1 million dollars.The court found that the two defendants received part of the ransom and deposited it into wallets under their control to conceal the source of the related assets.

According to the United Morning News, seven Malaysian gangsters targeted players attending a poker game, breaking into a luxury private residence in Bukit Timah late at night, armed and stealing over 4.9 million dollars, quickly splitting into two groups to escape Singapore. Six of them pleaded guilty in the High Court on Monday (September 14), with the two masterminds sentenced to 12 years and 11 months in prison, 24 strokes of the cane, plus a fine of 4,000 dollars.In court, it was revealed that the masterminds, Wu Wentong (30 years old) and Huang Zhishan (35 years old), learned from a friend who had previously attended the poker game that the house often held poker games at night. After scouting the location, they discovered that the front door of the house would not be locked during the game. Wu Wentong and Huang Zhishan then recruited five other accomplices, specifically coming to Singapore to commit the crime. This armed robbery occurred around 2 a.m. on April 18, 2024, at a residence in the upscale Alper Wang Garden area, where 11 men and women were playing poker in the living room.According to the case details, around March 2024, Wu Wentong and Huang Zhishan decided to rob the poker players at the house due to financial issues. They knew that they could not carry out such a large-scale robbery with just the two of them, so they contacted Hamidun, who runs a private security company and provides debt collection services, to help gather a team, promising a reward of 1.5 million ringgit (approximately 470,000 Singapore dollars). After the group succeeded, they left in a multi-purpose vehicle, splitting into two groups to leave Singapore via the Tuas and Woodlands checkpoints. At the same time, several players in the private residence managed to free themselves from their restraints and reported the robbery to the police. With the assistance of the Royal Malaysia Police, the six defendants were arrested between late April and November 2024 and were extradited to Singapore for prosecution. The police have since recovered virtual currency worth 1.69 million dollars, while the remaining funds and property are still missing.

Some criminal gangs use "free credit card repayment" as bait to lure ordinary people into providing credit card and identity information. They then launder illegal funds from overseas gambling, telecom fraud, and other activities by fabricating consumption and other means, and subsequently contact currency dealers to exchange for virtual currency to transfer abroad.

According to The Block, the U.S. Department of Justice reported that California man Adam Iza was sentenced to 15 years in prison for his involvement in a kidnapping conspiracy in August 2024.He assisted in planning and funding a kidnapping operation targeting the parents of a person involved in a multi-million dollar Bitcoin theft case, directing six men from Florida to carry out a violent carjacking and kidnapping in Connecticut via mobile phones and encrypted messaging apps. Currently, his brother and six participants have pleaded guilty, while the remaining conspirators are awaiting trial.

On the morning of August 20, 2026, the Intermediate People's Court of Shenzhen City, Guangdong Province publicly announced the first-instance verdict in the case of Evergrande Group Co., Ltd., Evergrande Real Estate Group Co., Ltd., and defendant Xu Jiayin. The court imposed multiple penalties on Evergrande Group, sentencing it to a fine of 8.82 billion yuan; it fined Evergrande Real Estate 7 billion yuan; and sentenced Xu Jiayin to life imprisonment for multiple crimes, depriving him of political rights for life, and confiscating all personal property; it also ordered the continued recovery of illegal gains, with any shortfall to be compensated.The court found that Xu Jiayin is the actual controller of Evergrande Group. Between 2016 and 2021, Evergrande Group, Evergrande Real Estate, and Xu Jiayin inflated assets and concealed liabilities through financial fraud and other means, committing crimes such as illegally absorbing public deposits, fundraising fraud, fraudulent issuance of securities, and illegally disclosing important information; they also obtained control of financial institutions through bribery, illegally siphoning off credit and insurance funds. Xu Jiayin further exploited his position to organize financial fraud, misappropriating company property under the guise of dividends. The court deemed these actions to severely disrupt the market economic order, with particularly huge amounts involved and particularly heinous circumstances, and imposed severe penalties according to the law.On the same day, the two levels of courts in Shenzhen also ruled on the cases of individuals involved in Evergrande related to illegally absorbing public deposits and fundraising fraud, sentencing 56 individuals including Zhen Litiao, Ke Peng, Xu Tenghe, and Xu Zhijian to prison terms ranging from eighteen years to one year and ten months, along with fines or confiscation of property.

According to CoinDesk, a South Korean court sentenced a cryptocurrency platform operator to 15 years in prison this week, involving an amount of approximately 50 million USD. This ruling is considered one of the longest sentences handed down in South Korea to date for cryptocurrency fraud.Reports indicate that this case occurred against the backdrop of South Korea strengthening its scrutiny of outbound fund transfers and related platforms like Binance implementing restrictive measures, reflecting the local regulatory authorities' ongoing tightening of efforts to combat cryptocurrency fraud and capital outflows.

A man in Anshun, Guizhou, used the name of a virtual currency airdrop project as a pretext to lure friends into investing with the bait of guaranteed high returns, ultimately crossing the legal red line. The People's Procuratorate of Pingba District, Anshun City, Guizhou Province, filed a public prosecution, and the court sentenced Zhao to seven months in prison for fraud, along with a fine of 5,000 yuan.Zhao had been paying attention to the field of virtual currency investment for many years and had long been posting investment insights and financial management tips on social media platforms. Zhang was also a virtual currency enthusiast, and the two met on a social platform due to their common interests, gradually becoming friends and frequently discussing investment strategies online. Through long-term communication, Zhao gained Zhang's trust with seemingly professional investment analysis. Subsequently, Zhao proposed a joint investment, to which Zhang agreed. However, after a period of investment, Zhang experienced significant losses and expressed his intention to stop further investments.On August 23, 2025, Zhao claimed that a certain app had launched an airdrop project (to promote a new project, encourage user participation, or reward loyal users, distributing native tokens of the project for free to eligible users), persuading Zhang to invest the remaining funds in his account into this project, promising a return of 100 to 200 U coins (virtual currency) within two days. Zhao also guaranteed that if there were any losses during this period, he would bear the responsibility. To further alleviate Zhang's concerns, Zhao claimed that all investment funds would be transferred to a public chain (the public address of the virtual currency). Believing Zhao, Zhang exchanged 1,757 dollars in his account for Ethereum and completed the transfer according to the wallet link provided by Zhao. In reality, the wallet corresponding to that link was a personal account registered using his girlfriend's identity information, not a public chain. The agreed time for the return of funds had passed, but Zhao had not fulfilled his promise. Zhang urged for repayment multiple times, but Zhao evaded responsibility with excuses such as sending the wrong link and needing time to track it down. On September 7 of the same year, Zhang reported the situation to the police after noticing something was wrong.On April 2 of this year, the Pingba District Procuratorate filed a public prosecution against Zhao for suspected fraud. The procuratorial agency believed that Zhao deceived others out of property by concealing the truth, with a significant amount involved, constituting the crime of fraud. Given that Zhao truthfully confessed to the criminal facts after being apprehended, showed signs of remorse, and had fully compensated the victim for their losses while voluntarily admitting guilt, he could be punished leniently according to the law.

According to Digital Asset, a South Korean court has made a first-instance ruling regarding Delio CEO Jeong Sang-ho involved in a cryptocurrency fraud case amounting to approximately 250 billion won (about 180 million USD), sentencing him to 15 years in prison.The 11th Criminal Division of the Southern District Court of Seoul stated that Jeong's criminal conduct was serious, and he continued to shift responsibility to other companies while attempting to evade accountability. This ruling comes about three years and two months after Delio suspended withdrawals in June 2023.

According to the Procuratorial Daily, an employee of a company in Shenzhen, under the pressure of over 400,000 yuan in online loans, stole the company's core research and development materials and disguised himself as an overseas hacker, demanding a ransom of 0.88 bitcoins and 90,000 USDT from the company. He was ultimately sentenced to three years and three months in prison for attempted extortion and fined 10,000 yuan.

According to The Block, former Los Angeles police officer Eric Halem was sentenced to life in prison plus 15 years for his involvement in a cryptocurrency-related robbery case.

Justin Ryan Schmidt, the founder of the cryptocurrency investment fund Translunar Crypto LP, has been sentenced to 37 months in prison by a U.S. court for tax evasion. The U.S. Department of Justice stated that the 46-year-old Schmidt pleaded guilty this year in federal court in Austin, Texas, where he was accused of underreporting income, declaring less than $5,000 in income from 2020 to 2022, while prosecutors claimed he actually earned over $7 million through fund operations from 2019 to 2022.It is reported that Schmidt founded Translunar in 2017, primarily investing in blockchain startups, with funding mainly coming from investors in the Austin area of Texas and Aspen, Colorado. He was arrested by the IRS Criminal Investigation Division on February 23, 2026, and has been in custody since then.

According to a report by The Paper, the Intermediate People's Court of Xilin Gol League in Inner Mongolia upheld the original verdict in the second trial of the case involving Ma for illegal business operations. This case is part of a series of cases where the Sifang payment platform provided funding and payment settlement for gambling platforms. Some defendants in this case were accused of receiving commissions or rebates in the form of virtual currencies such as USDT.It was found that from May 24, 2022, to October 18, 2023, Ma and four others illegally collected and paid funds through third-party payment accounts, and received USDT virtual currency and bank card payments through virtual wallets. They settled amounts exceeding 2.95 billion yuan through 105 merchants of 10 third-party payment companies.Ultimately, the court determined that Ma was guilty of illegal business operations, sentencing him to four years and six months in prison and imposing a fine of 3 million yuan. The five individuals who turned themselves in have been sentenced to prison terms ranging from 3 to 6 years for illegal business operations.