A Brooklyn man was sentenced to 12 years in prison after conspiring to steal $16 million through an Coinbase -fiching scheme.

What's going on?

New York District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced last Wednesday that Ronald Spector, a 23-year-old Brooklyn native who pleaded guilty to defrauding Coinbase users of nearly 100 accounts by embezzling about 16 million US dollars and was sentenced to 12 years in prison.

How 's it going ?

Spectre has been running phishing and social engineering schemes for more than a year, tricking victims into believing their accounts were hacked and then luring them to transfer money to an account he controls. This is the form in which victims often pay themselves voluntarily because they mistakenly believe that they are "transferring money to a safe place".

Gonzalez said the virtual currency unit of the prosecutor's office tracked digital evidence based on stolen money and gathered hard evidence to identify those responsible. He called the case a "digital assault" against nearly 100 victims.

Why is this important?

Social engineering scams rank as the number one threat to the crypto industry by 2025, and are likely to worsen this year. Data from WhiteBIT indicates that nearly 41% of last year's crypto security incidents involved deceiving victims directly.

A report by Chainalysis indicates that the criminals came to target "people" instead of attacking infrastructure such as platform's security systems. Earlier this month, a 22-year-old Singaporean man also confessed in a criminal network that hacked for $245 million, mostly from social engineering scams as well.

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Whether you're using Coinbase , Bitkub or storing cryptocurrencies in any form, this hacker group doesn't hack the system but it does target people. A point to remember: if someone claims to be a mall official or reports that an account has been hacked and then sends money out of the original account, that is exactly the kind of fraud that fits into every case. This 12-year prison sentence shows that law enforcement agencies are serious about catching these types of frauds, and cases can actually proceed even when funds have been transferred through multiple accounts.