A Singaporean man pleaded guilty on Tuesday to a racketeering conspiracy charge in the US for organising one of the biggest ever cryptocurrency thefts.
Malone Lam admitted to teaming up with friends to steal $245m (£181m) of bitcoin and laundering the proceeds.
The 22-year-old and his associates used the money to spend up to $500,000 per evening at nightclubs, according to the US Department of Justice (DOJ). It also said they bought a fleet of exotic cars, ranging in value from $100,000 to $3.8m.
Lam faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years. US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly did not immediately schedule a sentencing hearing for him.
“If you build a cybercrime empire, we will find you, dismantle your operation, and hold you accountable,” said US Attorney Jeanine Pirro said.
“This defendant led an international network that preyed on victims through deception, invaded their privacy, and stole hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency,” she added.
Lam told investigators in the US that he had dropped out of secondary school in Singapore when he was 14. He travelled to the US in October 2023 and remained there after his visa expired in January the next year.
According to court documents, the conspiracy began no later than October 2023 and continued to at least May 2025.
The co-conspirators, who came from California, Connecticut, New York, Florida, and outside the US, met via online gaming platforms.
The DOJ said Lam, who also went by the names Anne Hathaway, $$$ and King Greavy, was the ringleader of the criminal enterprise, who identified victims and coordinated the roles of the different conspirators.
They tricked people into giving away confidential information and conducted occasional home break-ins to obtain details that allowed them to drain their victims’ cryptocurrency wallets, the DOJ said.
The stolen cryptocurrency was also used to buy Hermes Birkin handbags, valued in the tens of thousands of dollars, which were thrown into crowds at nightclub parties, according to the DOJ.
Other items that the DOJ said the proceeds were spent on included high-end watches worth up to $500,000, luxury clothing valued in the tens of thousands of dollars, rental homes in Los Angeles, the Hamptons, and Miami, private jet rentals for travel and a team of private security guards.
Lam was “notorious” in the Los Angeles and Miami nightclub scenes because of his flamboyant lifestyle, and his crypto windfall had also drawn attention, a Florida district court heard earlier.
His crime ring was dismantled when FBI agents arrested him and a co-conspirator in September 2024.
“As I was listening to the evidence, I could only think of Ferris Bueller gone bad,” US magistrate Alicia Valle said during Lam’s first court appearance, referring to the 1986 movie about a boy who feigned illness to skip school and go on a wild adventure around Chicago.
“[He] spent this money wildly, going to Los Angeles nightclubs, purchasing more than 30 high-end luxury automobiles. I mean, [that’s] an incredible amount of spending and craziness that followed his coming into more than $230 million,” the judge said.
In April this year, one of Lam’s co-conspirators, Evan Tangeman, was sentenced to 70 months in prison for laundering the proceeds of the scheme.
Tangeman had also tried to destroy evidence after Lam’s arrest, which the court took as “consciousness of his guilt”, the DOJ said.
By BBC
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