Damian Williams, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, announced that Esteban Cabrera Da Corte of Miami, Florida, was indicted by the U.S. District Court for masterminding a scheme to steal millions of dollars in cryptocurrency and tricking U.S. banks into returning funds used to purchase the cryptocurrencies. Judge Katherine Polk Failla sentenced him to 63 months in prison and ordered him to pay $3.57 million in restitution and a $1.2 million fine.

Cabrera Da Corte and her co-conspirators defrauded U.S. banks and cryptocurrencies by using forged and stolen identity information to purchase more than $4 million in cryptocurrency on a major crypto exchange starting in 2020 and then falsely claiming that the transactions were unauthorized. The trading platform reversed the trades and redeposited the funds into bank accounts controlled by the defendants.