A Sheepshead Bay man is facing a 31-count indictment that alleges he ran a phishing and social engineering scheme that targeted cryptocurrency investors and led to the theft of $16 million.<\/p>\n
Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced on Friday that Ronald Spektor, was arrested on Dec. 3.<\/p>\n
“He used psychological warfare, to trick people into making, bad decisions,” he said at a press conference.<\/p>\n
Gonzalez said the 23-year-old went by the handle @lolimfeelingevil online where he bragged about his exploits and attempted to recruit others to join his phishing scam operation.<\/p>\n
“We allege that he chatted with someone about blowing $6 million on gambling,” said Gonzalez. “I guess he treated it like Monopoly money because it wasn’t his money.”<\/p>\n
Spektor was arraigned in court today and pleaded not guilty to the charges, which include grand larceny, money laundering and scheme to defraud.<\/p>\n
His bail is set at $500,000 cash.<\/p>\n
A yearlong investigation by the DA’s Virtual Currency Unit uncovered the Coinbase phishing scheme that they said resulted in the theft of nearly $16 million from about 100 cryptocurrency investors in the United States.<\/p>\n
Victims told investigators they were flooded with text messages that made it seem like their account was hacked, then contacted by a person that claimed to be a Coinbase representative who would convince them to move their assets into a new wallet.<\/p>\n
Once the money was moved, investigators said Spektor would drain the account.<\/p>\n
Gonzalez said his team was able to recover $500,000 in stolen funds and hopes to uncover more which would be given back to victims as restitution.<\/p>\n
In court prosecutors said it appears Spektor was plotting to flee the country before his arrest.<\/p>\n
They said after his arrest a search of his phone showed he made concrete plans which included applying for a new passport and sending cryptocurrency to a person in the country Georgia.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors also said they found messages which showed he was planning to flee to Mexico or Canada.<\/p>\n
His attorney brushed off those claims.<\/p>\n
“He’s a 23-year-old kid I am sure you can imagine, kids online are talking about all sorts of things its puffery its nothing more than that,” said Todd Spodek, defense attorney.<\/p>\n
Prosecutors also said his father attempted to post bail with money they believe could have belonged to victims adding his father is being investigated.<\/p>\n
Spektor is due back in court on Jan. 6.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A Sheepshead Bay man is facing a 31-count indictment that alleges he ran a phishing and social engineering…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":76070,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[98,100,99,6228,38213,9,24,63,38214,38215,5947,34047,10693,8193],"class_list":["post-76069","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-crypto","tag-crypto-currency","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-online-scams","tag-phishing-scam","tag-scam","tag-scammers","tag-scams","tag-sheepshead-bay"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76069","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76069"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76069\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/76070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76069"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76069"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76069"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}