Crypto heist: Hamilton youth who stole $48-million strikes again
24-Aug-2025.
A lonely, troubled youth appeared in a Hamilton courtroom on a summer day in 2022, to say he’s “very sorry” for stealing $48 million in cryptocurrency. He said, “I intend to move forward only in a positive direction”.
The 19-year-old now wanted to use his skills for good, to work in cybersecurity, “a fitting way for this case to come full circle”, his lawyer said.
The judge sentenced the young man to a year of probation, taking into account the year he already spent in custody and the fact that he was 17 when he did the deed. The young man, who cannot be named under Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act, was forbidden from dealing with crypto during his probation – not a significant deprivation, admittedly, but certainly damaging to the career of a young cybercriminal.
Had the young man truly, in his words, “taken this time to reflect on my actions and learn from mistakes”?
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The 2020 theft was the most crypto ever stolen from an individual, authorities pegged. It’s a matter of contention how big a role the young man played and how much of the $48-million he still had. But police would later say that, the same month he was being sentenced, the young man was privately bragging about his heist and said he still kept US$15-million.
What’s more, throughout that sentencing period, the young man who promised he’d never do it again was, in fact, doing it again: He was operating a separate, high-profile crypto heist.
On July 29 this year, the young man, labelled by prosecutors as a “sophisticated, successful and repeat cybercriminal,” was before a judge once more. This time, it was in Alexandria, Va., and he was sentenced to a year in prison.
The youth who can't be named under Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act, was sentenced to a year in prison at a courthouse in Alexandria, Va., for operating another crypto heist.
This series of heists reaped only about US$800,000, but it had garnered international attention and shook the crypto world. The 2022 heist targeted influential accounts on what was then called Twitter that dealt in NFT digital art.
The targets included “Beeple,” known for selling a record US$69-million NFT (nonfungibletoken) picture, which is based on crypto’s blockchain technology. nce compromised, those accounts scammed their followers out of crypto and NFTs.
Nobody knew then that behind the heist was this young man from Hamilton.
The case shines a spotlight not just on the young industry of crypto, estimated to be worth more than US$4-trillion, but also the rising cybersecurity dangers as more of our lives move online.
Court documents in the case, recently unsealed, grant insight into the dynamics among the hackers and scammers, almost always young men, and underscore a timeless truth: There is no honour among thieves.
When the young man was 18 months old his parents separated. He grew up with an absent father and in a household under financial strain. The defence writes in a sentencing submission, during his school years, he “was socially isolated, bullied for his weight”.
A psychological evaluation showed the young man “experienced emotional neglect, chronic instability, and trauma” that “made him particularly vulnerable to the influence of others.”
The prosecution, though, had a different narrative. “The defendant was responsible for the ‘social engineering’ aspects of the fraud schemes. In other words, it was his job to manipulate and deceive,” prosecutors wrote. “He in fact appears quite adept at interacting with and reading people.”
The earlier $48-million heist had been a SIM swap, in which perpetrators trick telecommunications companies into porting over victims’ cell phone numbers to SIM cards they control. With that phone number, scammers then breach owners’ other accounts, such as crypto.
