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Man Who Spent Millions on Rare Pokémon and Magic Cards Found Guilty of Stealing Over $50 Million in Crypto

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Man Who Spent Millions on Rare Pokémon and Magic Cards Found Guilty of Stealing Over $50 Million in Crypto

A 36-year-old cybersecurity consultant and apparent trading card collector from Maryland was just convicted of computer fraud and money laundering in a case involving more than $50 million in stolen cryptocurrency.

The U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday that Jonathan Spalletta was convicted of exploiting vulnerabilities in the code of the now-defunct crypto platform Uranium Finance, an exchange that allowed users to trade cryptocurrencies through liquidity pools.

He later used some of the stolen funds to buy rare Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering cards, along with antique Roman coins.

“Spalletta’s crimes cost real people to lose real money—over $50 million dollars—and caused an entire crypto platform to collapse,” U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jamie McDonald said in a press release.

According to the indictment and evidence presented at trial, Spalletta first hacked Uranium Finance on April 8, 2021. At the time, he carried out a series of deceptive transactions with one of the platform’s smart contracts that allowed him to withdraw more “rewards” than he was authorized to receive. He repeated the transactions until he stole about $1.4 million.

“I did a crypto heist of $1.5MM a couple of weeks ago . . . There was a bug in a smart contract, and I exploited it . . . Crypto is all fake internet money anyway,” Spalletta later told someone in writing.

He then extorted Uranium into allowing him to keep roughly $386,000 as a “bug bounty” in exchange for returning the rest of the stolen funds.


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