Authorities are charging a South Florida man after he allegedly ran a campaign that drained hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of crypto from gamers.
Zyaire Dontaevious Zamarion Wilkins, a 21-year-old North Lauderdale resident, is accused of conspiracy to obtain information by computer for private financial gain, reports WPLG Local 10.
The FBI says Wilkins and his co-conspirators launched eight games embedded with malware, including BlockBlasters, Dashverse, Lunara and PirateFi, in an effort to gain unauthorized access to cryptocurrency wallets. The FBI also says Wilkins and his crew allegedly ran a campaign that infected the devices of about 8,000 people, giving them access to 80 crypto wallets and enabling them to drain at least $220,000 in digital assets.
The FBI adds that chats on the encrypted messaging platform Signal showed that Wilkins purchased a “remote access Trojan” program for $10,000. The feds also say Wilkins and his group ran bots on Discord, Telegram, X, and LinkedIn “to identify individuals with large cryptocurrency holdings and send them targeted messages” urging them to download the infected games.
“After their victims downloaded the games, the conspirators used the malware to access and steal private user data and credentials. (They) went through the stolen data and identified any information that could be used to access, without authorization, cryptocurrency accounts of others and steal cryptocurrencies from their victims.”
If convicted, Wilkins could spend 10 years behind bars.
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