Canadian teenager accused of stealing cryptocurrency for $ 50 million

Canadian authorities have charged 18-year-old Samy Bensaki with four criminal charges in connection with a SIM swap scam that stole $50 million in digital assets.

According to prosecutors, a young hacker fromMontreal was a member of a gang robbing Canadian and American cryptocurrency owners. All the thefts in the two countries were committed in the spring of 2018, and most of the victims were participants in the New York Consensus conference, where allegedly scammers chose their goals.

The victims were not onlyinvestors, but also leading developers, crypto project managers.

Gang members reportedly cheated on servicesmobile operators to transfer victims' phone numbers to their own SIM cards. This allowed attackers to bypass most authentication and password recovery mechanisms that rely on confirmation via code in a text message or incoming number.

Sami Bensaki was arrested in November 2019, butin December, it was released on bail of $ 153 thousand, banning access to any devices with Internet access, as well as any form of ownership and exchange of cryptocurrencies.

Around the same time, the Australian police also carried out a successful operation to detain drug couriers, from whom they confiscated cryptocurrency worth a record amount for the country of $1 million.

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