- Fillippos Liakounakos, a 23-year-old man has been charged in Las Vegas.
- He has been charged with running a complex bitcoin scam.
- The scam allegedly stole up to $500,000 from a beginner cryptocurrency trader.
- He was arrested on Monday at the Clark County Detention Center on charges of theft over $100,000.
A 23-year-old man has been charged in Las Vegas. He has been charged with running a complex bitcoin scam. The scam allegedly stole up to $500,000 from a beginner cryptocurrency trader.
The boy’s name is Fillippos Liakounakos. He was arrested on Monday at the Clark County Detention Center on charges of theft over $100,000. He used another person’s identity to cause financial loss, and an unlawful felony act involving electronic mail or computer data transmission. As per our sources, his address is not listed in police records, but an arrest warrant in the case states that police identified him using a Florida identification card.
In a heavily redacted arrest warrant for him, a Las Vegas police detective wrote that the victim in the case, whose name was blacked out by police, notified the Internet Crime Complaint Center in November 2020 that he was the victim of a bitcoin scam. The victim told police that he was approached on the encrypted mobile chat app Telegram by a business associate he knew, and the two agreed to a bitcoin transaction.
In exchange for money, the victim transferred $500,000 in bitcoin to his business associate, which included a $50,000 seller’s fee. When he contacted the business associate the next day about the transaction, the individual had no idea what the victim was talking about, and the victim discovered that he had sent the money to an imposter posing as the business associate.
A detective wrote in the warrant that “I reviewed the transaction on the public blockchain and observed the BTC (bitcoin) being moved rapidly in what is commonly known as ‘peeling’ to obfuscate where the BTC was going”.
The victim contacted police in December to report that the imposter had contacted him again via Telegram as part of a proposed $999,900 bitcoin transaction. The victim was able to obtain an email from the imposter, which allowed police to serve a number of search warrants, leading detectives to issue the warrant for Fillippos. According to our sources, on Wednesday, Fillippos is scheduled to appear in Las Vegas Justice Court. The man’s attorney is not listed in online court records.
