Court records state that Chirag Tomar purchased Rolexes, Lamborghinis, Porches, and other items using his illicit income
This week, an Indian national entered a guilty plea to charges brought by the United States that he manufactured a phony Coinbase website in order to obtain login credentials for the genuine one and steal over $9.5 million in cryptocurrencies from hundreds of victims.
On December 20, 2023, Chirag Tomar, 30, was detained at the Atlanta airport while on a travel visa to visit family. One count of conspiring to commit wire fraud and one count of conspiring to commit money laundering were brought against him. A maximum term of 20 years in jail is imposed on both.
The first person to notice Tomar’s situation was Seamus Hughes of CourtWatch.
Court records from the Western District of North Carolina state that Tomar and his accomplices impersonated Coinbase Pro in order to trick Coinbase users into sending their login credentials. With Tomar’s arrest in late 2023, at least 542 victims had their cryptocurrency stolen between at least June 2021 and that time.
Court filings reveal that Tomar’s use of an email account under his actual name for correspondence with both known and unknown co-conspirators in the fraud allowed the U.S. Secret Service to identify him as a part of the crime ring. Along with sending “stolen or fraudulently obtained” identity documents to additional email addresses used to register accounts at another cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, he also maintained a spreadsheet listing all of his victims and the amount of money that had been stolen from them.
Tomar searched the internet for terms such as “fake coinbase page,” “coinbase scam,” “scams in the USA,” and “how to take money from coinbase without OTP” between June 2021 and October 2022.
Tomar applied for his U.S. travel visa using the same email address.
Tomar supported his opulent lifestyle with the money he made from his scam, buying watches from Audemars Piguet and Rolex, “high-end luxury vehicles such as Lamborghinis and Porches,” and taking trips to Thailand, Dubai, and London.
Tomar hasn’t received a sentence yet.