Connecticut police have a $15,000 digital currency thief in custody. In a bizarre and surprising tale of crypto theft, the mobile phone digital currency thief got caught after he mistakenly sent an apology email to a detective who was covering the investigation.
Back in April a Connecticut resident fell prey to a crypto theft by New Jersey resident identified S Darren Carter. Carter had swiped the victim’s mobile phone and allegedly transferred $15,472 worth of crypto from their Coinbase account. According to New Jersey news outlet NJ.com, Carter then went on to convert the tokens into U.S dollars and transferred the money to his PayPal account.
In an attempt to apologize to the theft victim via email, Carter mistakenly sent the email to a detective investigating the theft case. After tracking him down, the police that went to arrest Carter found him already sentenced to a Salem county jail for unrelated charges. The authorities were able to recover the stolen funds from PayPal and returned them to the victim.
Crypto crimes have been well documented since the technology gained popularity. Back in January last year, an Australian citizen Catherine Nguyen pleaded guilty to stealing $450,000 in XRP over 100,000 tokens. Nguyen had hacked into the email of account of a man with the same last name as her.
Just this summer, another incident saw a former Microsoft employee arrested for a plot to steal $10 million in cryptocurrency. Although the plot was discovered while still in the early stages, it was found that already $2.8 million worth of cryptos had been found to have been transferred to private accounts.
A more recent case was reported by Blockchain cyber security company CipherTrace. The report had it that cyber criminals had netted $4.3 billion from digital currency exchanges, investors and users in 2019. The first quarter of 2019 saw the hackers make away with $124 million from crypto exchanges with a total of $480 million stolen from exchanges in 2019.
