Hardware Wallet Thief Gets 78 Months in Prison Over $250M Crypto ‘Heist’ – Decrypt

A 20-year-old California man was sentenced to 78 months in federal jail Wednesday for his position in a prison enterprise that prosecutors say stole greater than $250 million in cryptocurrency.

The enterprise operated for over a yr between late 2023 and early 2025, utilizing social engineering schemes to govern victims into revealing entry to their digital property.

Marlon Ferro, aka “GothFerrari,” served as what prosecutors known as the operation’s ” instrument of final resort,” breaking into properties when digital theft strategies failed. “When his co-conspirators couldn’t deceive victims into handing over entry to their cryptocurrency or hack their method into digital accounts, they turned to Ferro to interrupt into properties and steal {hardware} wallets outright,” stated U.S. Lawyer Jeanine Ferris Pirro.

Ferro, from Santa Ana, California, pleaded responsible to conspiracy to take part in a racketeer influenced and corrupt group, following his arrest on Could 13, 2025, the place authorities discovered him in possession of two firearms and a pretend identification doc. U.S. District Court docket Decide Colleen Kollar-Kotelly imposed the sentence, which additionally consists of $2.5 million in restitution and three years of supervised launch following his jail time period.



In February 2024, Ferro traveled to Winnsboro, Texas, the place he broke right into a sufferer’s residence and stole a {hardware} pockets containing about 100 BTC, then value greater than $5 million. 5 months later in New Mexico, he performed surveillance on one other residence earlier than smashing a window with a brick to seek for {hardware} wallets.

Ferro additionally served because the group’s “key cash launderer,” utilizing fraudulent ID to arrange a digital fee card at an unnamed “geo-blocked platform,” enabling members of the enterprise to spend their ill-gotten crypto good points.

Ferro himself used stolen cryptocurrency proceeds to fund the group’s lavish way of life, spending greater than $255,000 on designer clothes for his co-conspirators—together with Hermès Birkin luggage for the girlfriend of the group’s chief, following his arrest and sentencing in September 2024. Ferro “continued to help him from the surface,” laundering a whole lot of hundreds of {dollars} and utilizing the proceeds to pay for the conspiracy chief’s attorneys.

“This scheme blended subtle on-line fraud with old school housebreaking to empty victims of thousands and thousands of {dollars} in digital property,” Pirro stated within the sentencing announcement, including that Ferro’s sentence “sends a transparent message: cryptocurrency fraud is just not a victimless, consequence-free crime carried out safely behind a display—it’s severe prison conduct that can result in federal jail.”