Brooklyn Man Sentenced to 4-12 Years for Phishing $16M from Coinbase Users

Ronald Spektor, a 23-year-old from Brooklyn, was sentenced to 4-12 years in prison for stealing nearly $16 million from approximately 100 Coinbase users through a phishing operation.

The scheme ran from April 2023 to December 2024, during which Spektor posed as a Coinbase representative and convinced victims to hand over access to their digital assets. He would then transfer their crypto holdings into wallets he controlled, believing they were securing their funds.

Spektor's method was a textbook social engineering attack, where he contacted Coinbase users, impersonated company support staff, and warned them that their accounts were at risk of being hacked. The urgency was manufactured, but the fear was real enough to work.

The losses were staggering on an individual level, with at least one victim in California losing over $1 million and another in Virginia seeing over $900,000 disappear. Across roughly 100 targets, the total haul approached $16 million.