Sheepshead Bay Man Gets Prison For $16M Coinbase SIM-Swap Drain Of 100 Accounts

A 23-year-old Sheepshead Bay resident was sentenced to prison on Friday in Brooklyn federal court for a yearlong social engineering scheme that drained nearly $16 million from nearly 100 Coinbase customer accounts.

The defendant, whose identity was confirmed in court records reviewed by The Block, pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the operation, which prosecutors said targeted Coinbase users through a coordinated campaign of SIM-swapping and phishing attacks. The scheme ran for approximately 12 months before law enforcement intervened, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of New York.

Court documents detail how the defendant and unnamed co-conspirators gained unauthorized access to victims' phone numbers and email accounts, then used that access to bypass two-factor authentication protections on Coinbase accounts. The attackers drained digital assets from roughly 100 customer accounts, with total losses approaching $16 million at the time of the thefts, prosecutors said.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Matthew R. Galeotta, who led the prosecution, said in court that the defendant exploited "the trust that consumers place in financial technology platforms" and that the sentence "reflects the seriousness of the offense." The judge ordered restitution to be determined at a later hearing, though the exact amount and mechanism for victim compensation remain unresolved.