A Texas man has been sent to the slammer for a sophisticated cryptocurrency con amounting to over half a million bucks, said U.S. Attorney Alamdar S. Hamdani. Sugar Land resident, Xiaofei Chen, aged 37, is set to serve 24 months following his guilty plea pressed on Oct. 12 last year, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office, Southern District of Texas. After his time behind bars, he's facing an added year of supervised release.
U.S. District Judge Alfred H. Bennett was the one to hand down the sentence. Meanwhile, Chen has been given the chance to stay out on bond and to voluntarily surrender to a federal lockup on a date yet to be decided.
Chen's scheme involved swiping a victim’s name, driver's license, and banking details, only then to funnel a cool $520,000 out of the victim's account. Posing as the unsuspecting account holder, he opened a Bitstamp cryptocurrency exchange account using the purloined information with nary a permission, as federal prosecutors reported.
Chen proceeded to convert the ill-gotten gains into Bitcoin and continued to launder the stash through a slew of online transactions. The FBI was quick to catch on to the fraudulent high-tech shell game, leading to Chen being brought to justice. Assistant U.S. Attorneys Christian Latham and Belinda Beek were the legal eagles that spearheaded the prosecution.
