Brooklyn man sent to prison for 12 years for stealing $16M in a Coinbase phishing scheme

A Brooklyn resident is headed to prison for 12 years after pleading guilty to scamming nearly 100 Coinbase users out of roughly $16 million dollars, a New York district attorney said Wednesday.

Ronald Spektor, 23, ran a phishing and social engineering scheme for over a year, convincing his victims that they had been hacked and that they should transfer funds to accounts he controlled, said Eric Gonzalez, a New York district attorney.

Social engineering scams topped crypto threats in 2025 and are getting worse this year. WhiteBIT said nearly 41% of all crypto securityincidents last year involved fraudsters deceiving victims. Earlier this month, a 22-year-old Singaporean pleaded guilty to a network of criminals that netted $245 million mostly from social engineering scams. A Chainalysis report noted that criminals were increasingly targeting individuals rather than infrastructure.

“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,” Gonzalez said. “Our Virtual Currency Unit painstakingly pieced together the digital proof that identified the defendant behind this sophisticated scheme, followed the money that he stole and compiled iron-clad evidence against him.”