A crew that met over online games just admitted to pulling off one of America’s biggest crypto heists.
Crypto scams have been sneaking into gaming for years, hiding inside modded downloads and fake tech support calls, and just last month a Florida man got caught stashing malware inside Steam games, tracked down through his Uber Eats orders. This crew isn’t small fry, though, as they went straight for sports cars, private jets, and Miami mansions.
Singapore dropout went on spending spree after $245 million crypto heist
Malone Lam, a 22-year-old high school dropout from Singapore, pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a racketeering conspiracy charge over the theft of $245 million in bitcoin, one of the largest cryptocurrency heists in US history.
Prosecutors said Lam recruited a loose crew of accomplices through online gaming platforms, then divided the labor: some scouted wealthy targets while others went masquerading as Google and Gemini support staff, tricking a Washington DC victim into handing over the codes guarding his crypto wallet and letting Lam siphon off millions in bitcoin, which laundering specialists spent months toiling to wash through a maze of exchanges.
Lam now faces up to 20 years in prison, with a hotly anticipated sentencing date still to come.
None of that slowed the celebrating down though. Stolen bitcoin fuelled a spending spree that spanned two coasts, with Lam and his crew renting mansions in Miami and the Hamptons, flying private jets, and dropping over $569,000 in one night at a Los Angeles nightclub, according to prosecutors.
The wider network, mostly young men in their late teens and early twenties, worked through a smorgasbord of more than 30 supercars, Hermes Birkin bags being slung into nightclub crowds, and a watch worth half a million dollars.
Lam cycled through aliases including Anne Hathaway, $$$, and King Greavy until FBI agents finally flung open the doors of his Miami mansion in September 2024, by which point the spending had become courtroom folklore.
“As I was listening to the evidence, I could only think of Ferris Bueller gone bad,” US Magistrate Alicia Valle said at his first court appearance, referencing the 1986 film about a teenager who fakes sick to joyride around Chicago’s environs.
Lam now joins a long line of crypto high-flyers discovering that the party always ends somewhere, following Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon, whose fraud of “generational scale” earned him 15 years behind bars late last year.
I’m Abhishek Sharma, an author at TigerJek.com. I enjoy exploring games, testing different strategies, and turning what I learn into clear, useful guides. My goal is to help players understand the game better and improve without the usual confusion.
