One of the judges in the United Kingdom has just sentenced a Dutchman to 54 months in prison.
According to the reports, the person is a 40-year-old Dutchman, Wybo Wiersma, who studied at St. Cross College in Oxford.
The sources have confirmed that the person has been sent to prison for running a cryptocurrency scam. Wiersma was caught by the law enforcement authorities running a scam and has been sent to prison.
Wiersma Stole Over $2 Million
According to the reports, Wybo Wiersma had been running a cryptocurrency scheme that was no less than a scam.
While running the scheme, Wiersma was able to steal £2,156,000 from the victims. Given the current exchange rate, the stolen value translates to $2.6 million.
Findings by the UK Detectives
The UK detectives had been investigating the scheme for a while. They have come up with their findings on the matter and have shared their investigation report.
It was due to their investigation that it was established that Wiersma was behind the scheme. They revealed that Wiersma had been using the pseudonym, Norbert to scam people.
He was regularly using the pseudo while he was running the malicious website and he did the same for the university coursework.
Sentence by the Judge
Michael Gledhill, the Judge presiding over the case reportedly announced a prison sentence against Wiersma for his offense. The judge has reportedly sentenced him to four and a half years.
He will be serving a long time in prison for stealing more than $2.5 million from the victims.
As per the detectives, Wiersma had started running his fraud when he studied at St Cross College. He was studying at the Internet Institute of the respective college.
Wiersma’s Crime
While at the college, the criminal launched a website and he used a false name when doing so. The website he set up required users to sign up and while doing so, the passwords they generated were seeds.
This meant that the users believed that these passwords were not compromised at all. He had even launched a cryptocurrency naming it MIOTA.
If the users wanted to gain access to the cryptocurrency, they were required to sign up through the particular website. As they do, they would end up setting up a password that would be compromised.
Wiersma had access to those passwords and he could use them as per his will. The token that the criminal had launched had built up a strong market valuation ever since its launch.
According to the market data, the valuation of the MIOTA token had surged past the $620 million benchmark.
How Wiersma carried out the Scam?
Whenever the users set up a new account through Wiersma’s website, their password would have a malicious code attached.
This would give access to Wiersma to the passwords of these users so that he could whenever he wanted to steal the funds.
After gaining access to the accounts of the users, Wiersma would transfer the funds over to his own account. It was back in January 2018 when the criminal had stolen MIOTA tokens from the users’ accounts.
Once the funds were stolen, he would convert them to Monero (XMR), thus increasing his stash.
Surprisingly, the platform Wiersma had set up did follow the money laundering and scamming protocols. Whenever he attempted to transfer funds, his account would get banned.
His account would end up getting intercepted by the protocols in place on the platform and his account would get frozen.
In order to unfreeze the account, he had to provide proof of identification. Whenever he faced such a situation, he would provide fake passports and other personal details to get past the protocols.
The UK law enforcement agents ended up raiding the place and found that his desktop was open. This gave them the opportunity to go through his computer and find out exactly what he was up to.
