Singaporean who stole the identity of League of Legends founder gets 10 years in prison for mining crypto
Matthew Ho, a 32-year-old resident of Singapore, has been jailed for 10 years after stealing his identity to buy cloud computing services and mining the second-largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum. The Straits Times Report. His father has posted bail of $180,000.
Riot Games co-founder Mark Merrill, best known for developing the popular multiplayer video game League of Legends, was among the victims of the fraud.
Ho was able to find Merrill’s American Express credit card details on a dark web forum. He then gained control of the game developer’s Amex account and used it to register with Amazon Web Service (AWS) in November 2017. As a respected game developer, Merrill had access to “advanced levels” of AWS’s cloud computing services.
Because of his document-forging skills, Ho was able to fake Merrill’s driving license to fool Amazon.
The South Korean impersonator managed to mine $350,000 worth of Ether in the above period.
Merrill ended up racking up over $5 million in bills in just a few months. The fraud was detected only in January 2018. He also used Merrill’s identity to buy Google’s computing services for $1.25 million.Amazon and Google refund Merrill’s credit card damages.
The allegations against Ho were initially disclosed by US officials in October 2019. A month later, Forbes informed of That the millionaire founder of Riot Games was one of the victims.
Ho was pinned down by the police because of the IP address provided by the tech giant.
