Bitcoin At The Heart Of Another Crime

On the 26th October this year, Robert Ross from San Francisco noticed that something wasn’t quite right when his phone lost signal somewhere it shouldn’t. Then Ross realised that this wasn’t the only thing he had lost as within just minutes he had also lost his whole $1 million life savings which includes the money he had hidden away for his children's college fund.

According to reports, the prosecutors believe that a Manhattan resident called Nicholas Truglia had targeted the mobile phones of Ross and numerous of others in SIM swapping attacks.

For those that don’t know, SIM swap attacks - sometimes known as Port Out scams - are when fraudsters manage to fool the customer's service staff of a mobile phone operator into giving them control of someone else’s phone number.

As reported by TripWire, the frauds do this by them saving the personal information about the victim to convince them of their identity. The court on the case, Santa Clara County, had heard claims that Truglia used a SIM swap attack to commandeer control of Ross’s phone and then gain unauthorised access to accounts.

From his apartment in Manhatten, the fraudster was able to withdraw half a million US dollars in each of the two digital banks, Coinbase and Gemini, convert it into digital currency and then move it into his personal account.

The court records claim that Truglia’s other victims included the CEO of 0Chain, Saswatu Basu, a hedge funder Myles Danielson and the co-founder and COO of Small and Medium Business Exchange, Gabrielle Katsnelson.

The fraudster was arrested in his apartment on the 14th November and during a search, they found a hardware wallet which contained $300,000 worth of cryptocurrency.

This isn’t the first time that this criminal has made headlines though, especially when it comes to cryptocurrency accounts being stolen from.

Before the arrest, earlier in the month, Truglia was named in media reports as claiming to have been tortured by four of his friends in an attempt to gain access his accounts of cryptocurrency. He claimed that his ‘friends’ held his head under water, threw hot wax on him and punched him several times in his stomach in order to get the ‘key’ to his cryptocurrency accounts.

After passing out, Truglia had noticed that his laptop, two mobile phones and a USB drive containing his crypto account information had been stolen from his apartment.

Perhaps this is how karma gets you in the cryptocurrency game?

What are your thoughts? Let us know what you think in the comments down below!