A man from Brooklyn impersonated a Coinbase customer service person and convinced his victims they’d been hacked.
Ronald Spektor, 23, was sentenced to up to 12 years in prison after pleading guilty to stealing nearly $16 million from almost 100 Coinbase users through a phishing and social engineering scheme.
Spektor persuaded victims to transfer cryptocurrency to accounts he controlled, then laundered the assets through exchanges, other cryptocurrencies, bets, gift cards and cash-out points.
Authorities ordered Spektor to pay nearly $16 million in restitution and forfeit more than $500,000 in assets as social engineering scams increasingly target individual cryptocurrency holders.
A Brooklyn resident is headed to prison for 12 years after pleading guilty to scamming nearly 100 Coinbase users out of roughly $16 million dollars, a New York district attorney said Wednesday.
Ronald Spektor, 23, ran a phishing and social engineering scheme for over a year, convincing his victims that they had been hacked and that they should transfer funds to accounts he controlled, said Eric Gonzalez, a New York district attorney.
Social engineering scams topped crypto threats in 2025 and are getting worse this year. WhiteBIT said nearly 41% of all crypto security incidents last year involved fraudsters deceiving victims. Earlier this month, a 22-year-old Singaporean pleaded guilty to a network of criminals that netted $245 million mostly from social engineering scams. A Chainalysis report noted that criminals were increasingly targeting individuals rather than infrastructure.
“Today’s sentencing holds the defendant accountable for a brazen, long-running social engineering scam that amounted to a digital robbery of nearly 100 victims,” Gonzalez said. “Our Virtual Currency Unit painstakingly pieced together the digital proof that identified the defendant behind this sophisticated scheme, followed the money that he stole and compiled iron-clad evidence against him.”
The attorney general’s office has also ordered Spektor to forfeit cash, cryptocurrency and personal property with an estimated value of more than half a million dollars and make restitution of almost $16 million.
The investigation into Spektor’s criminal activities revealed he laundered the digital assets by swapping them across multiple crypto exchanges and consolidating them at “cash-out points.” He then converted them into other cryptocurrencies and placed bets, before converting them into cash with which he purchased gift cards or additional digital assets.
“Coinbase and most other companies will never call customers or ask to transfer crypto to a ‘safe wallet’. Don’t trust caller ID, sender names or lookalike domains that can be spoofed,” Gonzalez said, adding that scammers rely on urgency and pressure, so “never move money in a rush.”
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/09/24/brooklyn-man-sent-to-prison-for-12-years-for-stealing-usd16m-in-a-coinbase-phishing-scheme.
