The US justice system handed a 24-month prison sentence to two Canadian nationals, who were involved in the theft of Bitcoins by scamming people.
Karanjit Singh Khatkar and Jagroop Singh Khatkar both were arrested last year by the US law enforcement and were charged with six counts of wire fraud and for conspiring to commit money laundering.
Both pled guilty to all the charges in December and, as mandated by their plea agreement, were fined $184,511 as a prepayment of restitution to their victims.
Notably, the maximum prison time for the charges is up to 20 years.
Along with the prison time, the perpetrators will be kept under supervised release for three more years.
Crypto scams in the rise
As reported by Finance Magnates earlier, they were charged for duping an Oregon resident out of more than 23.2 bitcoins by cloning the Twitter handle of HitBTC, a Hong Kong-based crypto Exchange .
The indictment detailed that the two defrauded people from October 2017 and continuing until August 2018.
“Using the fraudulent Twitter account, the defendants responded to the Oregon victim’s questions about withdrawing virtual currency from her HitBTC account,” the official press release by the Department of Justice noted. “The defendants convinced the victim to send information they could use to log on and take over her email, HitBTC and Kraken accounts.”
The victim lost thousands of dollars as the two took over her emails and transferred in excess of $200,000 in crypto assets from HitBTC to their Kraken accounts.
As law enforcement remains vigilant, many crypto criminals are getting nabbed in the United States.
Earlier this month, two Chinese nationals were charged for their involvement in a $100 million money laundering with the stolen funds from a crypto exchange. The US securities regulator also charged a Canadian for pulling an Initial Coin Offering (ICO) ) scam.
