Las Vegas police say man swindled $500K in bitcoin from trader

A 23-year-old man has been charged in Las Vegas with what authorities say was a posh bitcoin rip-off that swindled as a lot as $500,000 from a novice cryptocurrency dealer.

Fillippos Liakounakos was booked on the Clark County Detention Heart on Monday on fees of theft greater than $100,000, utilizing one other individual’s id to trigger a monetary loss and illegal felony act involving piece of email or transmission of pc information.

A spot of residence shouldn’t be listed in police data for Liakounakos, however an arrest warrant within the case notes that police recognized him with the assistance of a Florida identification card.

A Las Vegas police detective wrote in a heavily-redacted arrest warrant for Liakounakos that the sufferer within the case, whose identify was blacked out by police, notified the Web Crime Grievance Heart in November 2020 that he was the sufferer of a bitcoin rip-off.

The sufferer instructed police he was approached by a enterprise affiliate he knew on the encrypted cell chat app Telegram, and that the 2 agreed to a bitcoin transaction.

The sufferer then transferred $500,000 in bitcoin, which included a $50,000 vendor’s payment, to his enterprise affiliate in trade for cash.

However the subsequent day, when he contacted the enterprise affiliate in regards to the transaction, the person had no thought what the sufferer was speaking about, and the sufferer discovered that he had despatched the cash to an imposter posing because the enterprise affiliate.

“I reviewed the transaction on the general public blockchain and noticed the BTC (bitcoin) being moved quickly in what is often often known as ‘peeling’ to obfuscate the place the BTC was going,” a detective wrote within the warrant.

In December, the sufferer contacted police to say that the imposter had contacted him once more by way of Telegram as a part of a proposed $999,900 bitcoin transaction. The sufferer was in a position to receive an electronic mail from the imposter and this, in flip, allowed police to serve quite a lot of search warrants that in the end led detectives to concern the warrant for Liakounakos.

Liakounakos is predicted to seem in Las Vegas Justice Court docket on Wednesday. On-line courtroom data don’t checklist an legal professional for the person.

Contact Glenn Puit by electronic mail at [email protected] Comply with @GlennatRJ on Twitter.