The 36-year-old, who is a dual citizen of Canada and the U.S., pleaded guilty in a U.S. district court in California for money laundering crimes that involved the theft of funds from bank accounts in the U.S., Canada., the UK, and several other locations around the world.
The man was sentenced to 140 months in federal prison and ordered to pay $30 million in restitution to victims after he was found guilty of laundering millions of dollars.
The most notable crime was involving cyber theft by North Korean hackers.
Court documents showed the man had many co-conspirators. Together they used schemes that compromised business email addresses, ATM cash-outs, and bank cyber-heists to steal money from victims. After the theft, he laundered the money through various bank accounts and digital currencies.
In Los Angeles, he recruited and organized individuals to withdraw stolen money from ATMs after obtaining it through cyber-heists and fraud schemes. The stolen money included a 2019 cyber-heist of a Maltese bank and a 2018 ATM cash-out theft from BankIslami in Pakistan. The stolen money would be deposited in bank accounts through wire transfers, ATM cash withdrawals, and investing in cryptocurrency.
In 2017, the man sent fraudulent emails to appear as if they were from a construction company requesting payment for a major building project to a Canadian university. The university, believing it was paying the construction company, wired $11.8 million Canadian to a bank account controlled by the man.
Those funds were then laundered through various financial institutions in the U.S.
Later, he arranged for a co-conspirator to make trips to Texas to impersonate wealthy bank customers using their stolen personal information in an arrangement to steal thousands of dollars from victims’ bank accounts. Originally sourced by:https://www.cbc.ca
