100 Million Yen Crypto Scam Exposed Via Monero (XMR) Data in Japan – Organizer Arrested

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Chinese crypto journalist and blogger Colin Wu has shared news about the Japanese police succeeding, for the first time, in identifying and arresting a cyber criminal by tracing his Monero (XMR) transactions and analyzing the gathered data. The arrested crypto villain had a team of approximately 20 people, and together they earned more than 100 million yen.

Wu’s data comes from today’s Nikkei article, a link to which he published in his post.

Caught over laundering money through XMR

According to Nikkei, Japanese cyber police joined forces with other police departments and managed to spot and then arrest a 26-year-old Yuta Kobayashi. His occupation in real life remains unknown, however, he is suspected of conducting computer fraud and using credit cards of unaware victims to obtain illegal profits.

The estimated damage brought by the culprits exceeds 100 million yen. The criminal group tried to launder the stolen funds using privacy coin Monero. It was designed to be highly confidential and make it impossible to trace senders and receivers of these coins. However, the cyber police managed to identify Kobayashi by tracing the XMR flow. This was the first-ever suspect to be identified by analysing data from XMR transactions.

The arrested suspect listed fictitious products on the Japanese flea market website Mercari in the summer of 2021. Then he used the credit card data of other people and led the operating company to believe that those transactions were completed, thus defrauding it of millions of yen.

Between June 2021 and January 2022, the scammer group conducted approximately 900 fraudulent transactions missing the credit cards of unaware people. This data was likely stolen using phishing via fake sites and fraudulent emails.

Up to now, apart from Yuta Kobayashi, 18 cyber criminals from his team have been taken into custody. Those gang members were hired as they were offered to take “illegal part-time jobs” on social media. All the communication between them and Kobayashi were conducted using high-confidence messenger apps.

CZ warns against scammers using his name

As reported by U.Today earlier, founder and former CEO of the Binance exchange, Changpeng Zhao, published a tweet, saying that he had noticed at least two verified X accounts impersonating him.

While they both start with “cz,” Zhao warned the community that he only uses the @cz_binance X handle.