Brooklyn man sentenced to 12 years for stealing $16M from Coinbase users

A 23-year-old from Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, will spend up to twelve years in prison after running a phishing operation that siphoned nearly $16 million from approximately 100 Coinbase users. Ronald Spektor was sentenced on September 23 following a guilty plea to a 31-count indictment that included grand larceny and money laundering charges. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced the sentencing, calling it a significant victory in the fight against cryptocurrency fraud. The scheme ran from April 2023 to December 2024, a stretch during which Spektor posed as a Coinbase representative and convinced victims to hand over access to their digital assets. The playbook: fake support, real theft Spektor’s method was a textbook social engineering attack. 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. Victims were then persuaded to transfer their crypto holdings into wallets Spektor controlled, believing they were securing their funds. Instead, their accounts were drained. The losses were staggering on an individual level. At least...