Singaporean Accused of Stealing $245M in Bitcoin Faces Plea Hearing
Malone Lam, a 22-year-old Singaporean, is set to face a plea agreement hearing in federal court in Washington on Tuesday. He's accused of being an organizer of a racketeering group known as the Social Engineering Enterprise, which prosecutors say stole over $245 million in Bitcoin from a single investor.
According to the indictment, callers posing as Google and Gemini staff convinced Victim-7, a Washington investor, to install remote desktop software and surrender his security codes. This allowed them to move more than 4,100 BTC out of his wallets.
The group, which grew out of friendships formed in online gaming, used stolen crypto databases to target their victims. If a victim kept coins on a hardware wallet, members would fly to the house and break in to steal it.
Prosecutors say the money was laundered through exchanges that don't require identification, then transferred into Monero through peel chains. Some of the cash was shipped back into the country inside stuffed toys.
Lam spent $4 million at Los Angeles nightclubs in a month and bought more than 30 cars, titling them to a shell company called Crypto Administration LLC.