A Brooklyn judge on Wednesday sentenced a local man who posed as Coinbase staff and drained nearly $16 million from about 100 of the exchange’s users to four to 12 years in prison, the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office announced.

Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Danny Chun imposed the term on Ronald Spektor, 23, of Sheepshead Bay. Spektor pleaded guilty on Sept. 2 to all counts of a 31-count indictment, including first-degree money laundering and first-degree grand larceny. The plea came with a promised sentence that the DA’s office opposed; prosecutors had sought seven to 21 years.

Spektor was also ordered to pay almost $16 million in restitution and to forfeit cash, crypto and personal property estimated to be worth more than $500,000.

“Today’s sentencing holds the defendant accountable for a brazen, long-running social engineering scam that amounted to a digital robbery of nearly 100 victims,” District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said in a statement.

How the Scheme Worked

Posing as a Coinbase representative, Spektor warned users that a hacker was threatening their holdings and talked them into moving their crypto to a fresh wallet they thought only they controlled, prosecutors said. He had access and emptied it.

Losses came to roughly $15.9 million, the office’s Virtual Currency Unit found after a yearlong investigation. Some victims lost $1 million or more.

The stolen crypto was swapped across exchanges and routed to mixers, gambling sites and online storefronts, according to the office, and investigators tied Spektor’s home IP address to several drained wallets.

On Telegram, under the handle @lolimfeelingevil, Spektor ran a channel called “Blockchain enemies” where he boasted about the thefts, prosecutors said. Messages recovered by investigators show he wrote that he had lost $6 million in crypto to gambling.

Coinbase’s Role in the Case

When Spektor was charged in December 2025, Coinbase Chief Legal Officer Paul Grewal said in the DA’s announcement of the charges that the exchange had assisted by “helping identify the perpetrator and the customers he defrauded,” and helping trace stolen funds.

In a separate incident in May 2025, Coinbase revealed that criminals had bribed overseas support contractors to steal customer data as part of a $20 million extortion attempt.

The DA’s office said Coinbase and most other companies never phone customers or ask them to move crypto into a so-called safe wallet.

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