A Hamilton teenager has been charged with $ 46 million. cryptocurrency theft, the largest ever reported by a single victim, police say.
In March 2020, the Hamilton Police Service cybercrime unit received a call from the FBI. Together with the U.S. Secret Service's e-crime task force, the FBI was investigating a cryptocurrency theft of a victim in the United States.
Some of the stolen cryptocurrency was used to purchase a rare username for a video game network, and the account behind that transaction, the researchers discovered, was linked to an address for Hamilton.
Hamilton police investigated the address, Police Detective Kenneth Kirkpatrick said, leading them to the suspect: a teenager.
The teenager has been charged with theft of more than $ 5,000 and possession of property or property gains obtained by crime.
On Wednesday, officials seized more than $ 7 million in cryptocurrency.
The accused cannot be identified under the Juvenile Criminal Justice Act. Det. Agent Kirkpatrick was reluctant to provide many details, even if the teenager is believed to have acted alone or as part of a larger group.
The theft was allegedly carried out through what is known as a SIM swapping attack.
Typically in this fraud scheme, the scammer calls the target's mobile service provider and, claiming their phone was lost or stolen, requests that the phone number be linked to a new SIM card that they control. (SIMs, or Subscriber Identity Modules, are small cards containing chips that connect mobile phones to wireless networks.)
The balloon and the mail provided the first look at the prevalence of phone number fraud attacks in Canada in October. According to data from Canada's telecommunications regulator, there were 3,038 SIM exchanges between August 2019 and May 2020.
Globally, more than US $ 2 trillion is invested in crypto assets, more than the total amount managed by Canadian mutual funds and exchange-traded funds. Some securities regulators have started raising the alarm about the dark side of the sector. Gary Gensler, a crypto expert who now heads the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, launched a recent media campaign to warn investors that the industry is rife with fraud, scams, and abuse.
โThis is something new for the police. It is new for us as a society in general, โsaid Det. Agent Kirkpatrick said about the cryptocurrency, adding that one focus of his three-year unit's work is public awareness.
โEducating our society on the dos and don'ts, like making sure you have multi-factor authentication on your social media, email and financial accounts, is very important. And make sure you use different passwords for all your different accounts, โhe said. โMake sure that if a site is breached and your password is exposed, not all of your accounts are compromised as a result. The educational piece on cybercrime in its early stage is very important. "
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