US Authorities Arrest Suspects in 4100 BTC Theft from Genesis Creditor

The FBI has arrested two men accused of conspiring to steal and launder over 4100 BTC (worth more than $230 million at the time) from an unnamed victim in the US capital. The investigation involved on-chain detective ZachXBT.

According to his findings, on August 19, Malone Lam and Jeandiel Serrano targeted a creditor of the bankrupt crypto lending platform Genesis. 

Using a fake phone number, they posed as Google support to compromise the victim’s personal accounts. Then, masquerading as support managers from the Gemini exchange, they informed the victim of a breach in their account and convinced them to reset two-factor authentication before transferring funds to a supposedly secure wallet.

At the hackers’ request, the user initiated a screen-sharing session, allowing the hackers to obtain access keys to the bitcoin wallet.

3/ Here is a private video recording showing the live reaction by multiple of the threat actors to receiving $238M.

Theft txn hash
4064 BTC — Aug 19 at 4:05 am UTC
4b277ba298830ea538086114803b9487558bb093b5083e383e94db687fbe9090 pic.twitter.com/djSxBTkOF8

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) September 19, 2024

In addition to the two individuals mentioned in the indictment, ZachXBT identified a third suspect under the pseudonym Wiz.

1/ An investigation into how Greavys (Malone Iam), Wiz (Veer Chetal), and Box (Jeandiel Serrano) stole $243M from a single person last month in a highly sophisticated social engineering attack and my efforts which have helped lead to multiple arrests and millions frozen. pic.twitter.com/dcY1e9xsPd

— ZachXBT (@zachxbt) September 19, 2024

The stolen amount was divided among the three accomplices, who then distributed it across dozens of exchanges and converted it into Litecoin, Ethereum, and Monero.  

Subsequent investigations revealed that a group of Ethereum addresses linked to Serrano and Wiz received over $41 million from two exchanges in recent weeks. 

The hackers spent the stolen funds on travel, nightclubs, cars, watches, jewelry, designer bags, and renting homes in Los Angeles and Miami. 

With the assistance of security researchers and the Binance exchange, law enforcement managed to freeze over $9 million in the perpetrators’ wallets. An additional $500,000 was recovered during the investigation.

Earlier, ForkLog reported that four former employees of the cryptocurrency exchange Huobi implanted trojans in client wallets and collectively stole over 40,000 seed phrases and private keys.