Malone Lam pleads guilty to RICO in $245M crypto theft

A 22-year-old Singaporean national admitted Sept. 8 to running an international cybercrime ring that stole and laundered more than $245 million in cryptocurrency, pleading guilty in Washington federal court to a single racketeering conspiracy count, the US Justice Department said.

"This guilty plea holds accountable the ringleader of an international criminal enterprise that used sophisticated social engineering and, in some cases, home break-ins to steal cryptocurrency from victims across the country," prosecutors said in a statement from the US Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia.

Malone Lam entered the plea before US District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who scheduled a status hearing for Dec. 8. The Justice Department did not announce a sentencing date or disclose whether the plea agreement includes cooperation, restitution or forfeiture terms. Assistant US Attorneys Christopher Howland and David Liss are prosecuting the case, which the FBI's Washington Field Office and IRS Criminal Investigation led.

The case began with the theft of more than 4,100 Bitcoin from a Washington resident on Aug. 18, 2024, worth over $230 million at the time. Blockchain investigator ZachXBT identified the victim as a Genesis creditor. Prosecutors alleged Lam and co-defendant Jeandiel Serrano posed as Google support staff to compromise the victim's accounts, then impersonated Gemini support to reset two-factor authentication and install screen-sharing software that exposed private keys.

A RICO case that grew to 14 defendants

A superseding indictment filed May 15, 2025 expanded the prosecution to 12 additional defendants and described a wider enterprise responsible for more than $263 million in alleged thefts, including a separate $14 million theft in July 2024 and a home break-in targeting a hardware wallet. Court documents say the group operated from no later than October 2023 through at least May 2025, recruiting database hackers, impersonators, money launderers and residential burglars through online gaming platforms.

Lam, who used the online aliases "Anne Hathaway," "$$$" and "King Greavy," allegedly identified victims and coordinated conspirators even while held in pretrial detention after his Sept. 18, 2024 arrest. Members laundered proceeds through crypto mixers, exchanges, pass-through wallets and virtual private networks, then spent the funds on private jets, rental mansions, watches and at least 28 exotic cars valued between $100,000 and $3.8 million each. Nightclub bills reached $500,000 per evening, prosecutors said.

The plea is the latest in a broader crackdown on the enterprise. Another participant received 78 months in prison for conduct that included residential burglaries, while a separate member was sentenced to 70 months for laundering stolen cryptocurrency. The wider case shows how digital deception now pairs with physical threats — home invasions accounted for 37 percent of documented physical crypto attacks through mid-2026, according to crypto.news reporting.

For the crypto sector, the prosecution signals that US authorities will treat organized theft as organized crime, deploying RICO statutes that carry far heavier penalties than wire-fraud charges and allow prosecutors to seize the luxury assets bought with stolen funds. Institutional custodians and exchanges face renewed scrutiny over the account-takeover and social-engineering vectors the group exploited, even as no recovery total has been disclosed. Lam's sentencing, expected after the Dec. 8 status hearing, will set a benchmark for how the federal courts calibrate punishment for large-scale digital-asset theft.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.