Nicholas Truglia gets 18 months in prison over $24M SIM swap scam
A New York man who allegedly was part of a cybercrime group that targeted digital currency owners has been sentenced to a year and a half in prison. Nicholas Truglia was convicted of laundering $24 million stolen from a blockchain consultant in New York.
Truglia pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit fraud in 2021 in a New York court, and last week U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein sentenced him to 18 months in prison.
Truglia lived a solitary life during the day, playing video games in his luxury Manhattan apartment, according to court documents. At night, he spent most of his days in nightclubs, telling anyone who cared to listen about how much money he had. As it turns out, most of that money came from scamming digital asset investors.
During sentencing, prosecutors revealed that Truglia owned $53 million in assets, including digital currencies, jewelry and art. He agreed to pay over $20 million in restitution.
While he has targeted several digital currency leaders over the past five years through SIM swapping hacks, Truglia was convicted for his role in a 2018 hack targeting Michael Terpin, a New York blockchain consultant who is the founder of Transform Group .
According to court documents, Truglia was not involved in the SIM-swapping hack himself. Rather, he was hired by the hackers to convert the stolen tokens they stole from Terpin, known as Triggers, into BTC.
Truglia’s defense attorney, Jeffrey Udell, argued in court that the judge should be lenient with his client because he had been diagnosed with autism. This made it harder for him to distinguish between the real and virtual worlds.
“He could not fathom that what he was doing online with these people was having real effects on people like Mr. Terpin,” the lawyer argued.
However, Judge Hellerstein was unmoved, handing down an 18-month prison sentence to the 25-year-old New Yorker who has already served 12 months of that sentence.
Although this is his first criminal case against him, Truglia has faced several civil lawsuits for his SIM-swapping hacking involvements. In a case filed in California in 2019, he was ordered to pay his victim $75 million in compensatory and punitive damages.
See: The presentation of the BSV Global Blockchain Convention, Trust But Verify: Everything
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