American citizen sentenced to six years in prison for cryptocurrency extortion

The court sentenced former Ubiquiti employee Nicholas Sharp to six years in prison for extortion of digital assets worth $2 million. This is stated in a press release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York.

Sharp was arrested in December 2021 on charges of using his position to steal confidential client data. Using the information obtained, the defendant sent emails with threats and a ransom demand of 50 BTC.

Upon learning of the incident, Ubiquiti representatives contacted law enforcement. They managed to identify the attacker by his VPN connection. He surfaced when he connected via a fake IP to his account on the anonymous Surfshark service, which he paid for via PayPal.

“Sharp repeatedly abused his administrative access to download gigabytes of confidential employer data. […] He also altered the names of session files to create the impression that other employees were responsible for his malicious actions,” the press release said.

Ubiquiti officially disclosed information about the incident in January 2021, describing it as “unauthorized access to certain information technology systems hosted by a third-party cloud provider.”

The defendant fully pleaded guilty. In addition to the prison term, Sharp received three years of probation. He is also required to pay a fine of $1.59 million.

Earlier this year, in May, the court sentenced former Coinbase product manager Ishan Wahi to two years in prison on insider trading charges.