Brooklyn man sent to prison for 12 years for stealing $16M in a Coinbase phishing scheme

In this news:

A Brooklyn resident is headed to prison for 12 years after pleading guilty to scamming nearly 100 Coinbase users out of roughly $16 million dollars, a New York district attorney said Wednesday.

Ronald Spektor, 23, ran a phishing and social engineering scheme for over a year, convincing his victims that they had been hacked and that they should transfer funds to accounts he controlled, said Eric Gonzalez, a New York district attorney.

Social engineering scams topped crypto threats in 2025 and are getting worse this year. WhiteBIT said nearly 41% of all crypto security incidents last year involved fraudsters deceiving victims. Earlier this month, a 22-year-old Singaporean pleaded guilty to a network of criminals that netted $245 million mostly from social engineering scams. A Chainalysis report noted that criminals were increasingly targeting individuals rather than infrastructure.

“Today’s sentencing holds the defendant accountable for a brazen, long-running social engineering scam that amounted to a digital robbery of nearly 100 victims,” Gonzalez said. “Our Virtual Currency Unit painstakingly pieced together the digital proof that identified the defendant behind this sophisticated scheme, followed the money that he stole and compiled iron-clad evidence against him.”

Share the article:

Top Trending Cryptocurrencies on The Market

Current Price

$8.153

7 Days
INJ 7 days: +14%

Market Cap

$817.3M -7.67%

24h Volume

$330.3M

Supplies

100.0M / ∞

Current Price

$1.922

7 Days
ZRO 7 days: +6.25%

Market Cap

$767.5M -3.61%

24h Volume

$133.1M

Supplies

1.0B / 1.0B

Current Price

$0.8036

7 Days
APT 7 days: +4.24%

Market Cap

$710.2M -0.77%

24h Volume

$104.7M

Supplies

1.2B / 2.1B

Current Price

$0.02569

7 Days
STABLE 7 days: -12.33%

Market Cap

$700.6M -3.22%

24h Volume

$9.9M

Supplies

100.0B / 100.0B

Current Price

$2.201

7 Days
CAKE 7 days: +1.62%

Market Cap

$699.0M -0.74%

24h Volume

$58.0M

Supplies

329.5M / 400.0M

Current Price

$0.9986

7 Days
GHO 7 days: +0.06%

Market Cap

$698.0M 0.02%

24h Volume

$1.9M

Supplies

699.0M / ∞

Current Price

$0.03446

7 Days
XDC 7 days: +22.36%

Market Cap

$687.4M 8.92%

24h Volume

$10.6M

Supplies

38.1B / ∞

Current Price

$0.04110

7 Days
NIGHT 7 days: -2.17%

Market Cap

$686.6M 3.84%

24h Volume

$21.0M

Supplies

24.0B / 24.0B

Current Price

$0.6952

7 Days
ETHFI 7 days: +14.77%

Market Cap

$672.1M 0.00%

24h Volume

$54.3M

Supplies

965.4M / 1.0B

Current Price

$0.3579

7 Days
STX 7 days: -14.11%

Market Cap

$669.9M 0.50%

24h Volume

$35.0M

Supplies

1.9B / ∞

Current Price

$51.136

7 Days
DASH 7 days: +10.03%

Market Cap

$659.0M 1.94%

24h Volume

$50.1M

Supplies

12.9M / 18.9M

Current Price

$1.192

7 Days
EUTBL 7 days: +0.14%

Market Cap

$640.2M -0.01%

24h Volume

-

Supplies

537.2M / ∞

Notifications Login to see

Today

No Notifications

↑