Not everyone gets to receive compensation when they lose their digital currencies to hackers and sim swappers, but Michael Terpin, an American crypto investor, has been awarded $75.8 million in a court ruling against 21-year-old Nicholas Truglia.
This is coming after the victim filed a civil lawsuit against Truglia, who lives in Manhattan for being part of a cyber scheme that defrauded him (Terpin) of a large sum of digital currencies.
The verdict from the California Supreme Court will see that Nicholas Truglia compensates Terpin with the amount mentioned above as punitive damages. This marks the juiciest court judgment ever awarded a single individual in the cryptocurrency space, which further emphasizes that crypto crimes are a real offense.
In January 2018, Terpin observed that his funds had been stolen after Truglia and his accomplices fraudulently gained control over Terpin’s phone number, which allowed them to reset his passwords and peer into online accounts.
Michael Terpin claimed that they stole about $24 million worth of his cryptocurrencies and he also filed a separate case to the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles against his service provider AT&T for aiding and abetting the sim swap which led to the loss of his cryptocurrencies.
Although Terpin may have gotten more than what he lost to the hackers, his separate lawsuit against the telecommunication company stated that he wants ten times the amount he had lost for compensation, meaning he is seeking $224 million from AT&T for damages.
Nicholas Truglia seems to have a knack for crypto-related crimes. In 2018, one Robert Ross also sued the 21-year-old for stealing $1 million worth of cryptocurrencies from his (Ross) Coinbase and Gemini Wallets.
In November, we reported that Truglia was convicted and 30% of the stolen fund was recovered from his computer hard drive after further investigations. He was also charged for several other cyber crimes which involved many sim swaps.
Cryptocurrency crimes are on the rise as a recent report from cybersecurity firm CipherTrace revealed that fraudulent activities and crimes in the crypto space had generated a total loss of $1.2 billion in the first quarter of 2019.
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