SINGAPORE – Singaporean Malone Lam was 19 when he flew to Texas in October 2023 on his own to live with a few gamers he befriended online through the video game Minecraft.
Within a month of living together, the group hatched a plan to steal cryptocurrency by impersonating employees of security and technical support teams at major companies like Google and cryptocurrency exchanges like Coinbase.
Lam, who told US investigators he had dropped out of school when he was 13, used his knowledge of computer software and technology to obtain breached databases containing cryptocurrency-related information and lists of high-net-worth individuals.
The group then targeted these individuals.
After analysing the stolen data, Lam triggered “account access attempt” push notifications to the targets to make them think there were unauthorised attempts to access their accounts.
Other members of the group would then convince the targets to provide personal account information by pretending to be security technicians, gaining access to their digital currency wallets or passwords to their accounts before stealing their cryptocurrency.
On Sept 9, Lam pleaded guilty in the US District Court for the District of Columbia to his role as a ringleader in organising one of the US’ largest cryptocurrency thefts.
Around June 2024, Lam and his associates targeted a victim by accessing his iCloud storage account through social engineering methods.
They concluded that the victim held a significant amount of cryptocurrency in a digital wallet.
When Lam was unable to break into the wallet online, the group sent an associate to break into the victim’s house in New Mexico, but they were ultimately unable to access the digital wallet even after breaking into his home.
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