An investigation by top on-chain analyst ZachXBT has revealed how an alleged New York-based con artist stole millions of dollars from victims by pretending to be support staff from Coinbase.
In a thread on the social media platform X, the pseudonymous sleuth details how a man named Christian Nieves – who goes by “Daytwo” and “PawsOnHips” online – allegedly stole $4 million from Coinbase users by impersonating employees at the crypto exchange.
ZachXBT says that Nieves operates a small scam-call center group and also works as a caller. The group allegedly primarily coerces their victims into setting up a Coinbase wallet with an already compromised seed phrase on phishing sites.
Other people in Nieves’ circle also allegedly helped in separate thefts, including a henchman named Justin going as “Paranoia” who executed a $240,000 heist of an elderly victim’s Bitcoin (BTC) wallet.
According to ZachXBT, a portion of that $240,000 was deposited into crypto betting site Roobet, and the rest was converted into Monero (XMR).
“I traced out his casino deposit address which links onchain to 30+ suspected thefts.
I expect there’s many additional victims I am unable to directly link.
While there’s potentially overlap between multiple threat actors the vast majority of activity pertains to Daytwo…
Daytwo has a gambling problem and you’ll see onchain how casino deposits get smaller as he loses funds.
Recently this escalated to the point where he started stealing cuts from accomplices.”
At time of writing, Nieves and his alleged accomplices have not been charged with anything by law enforcement, but given the amount of digital and on-chain evidence, ZachXBT says it should be a “rather easy” case for authorities.
However, most of the victims’ money is likely unrecoverable since it has been lost to gambling, the analyst says.
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