An Arizona man posing as an Uber driver has been arrested after being accused of stealing nearly $300,000 in crypto from unsuspecting passengersNBC News reports.
Officers with the Scottsdale Police Department arrested 40-year-old Nooruhusein Hussain on December 11 on felony charges of theft, fraud and money laundering.
Police, working with the US Secret Service field office in Phoenix, found evidence that Hussain posed as an Uber driver between March and December 2024, picking up people who hailed the real Uber driver outside a local hotel as passengers entered. he was asking them for directions on the phones.
With the phone in hand, authorities say Hussain was able to transfer a total of $223,000 in crypto from victims’ Coinbase accounts to phone-to-phone transfers or phone-to-cold storage.
“While tampering with the unsuspecting victim’s phone, the suspect transferred cryptocurrency from her digital wallet to her digital wallet,” Scottsdale police said in a statement.
Court documents reveal one victim’s story that he asked for the phone back and Hussein gives a worrying answer. “He made threats to one of the victims that they needed to stay calm or something bad would happen and the victim believed he had a gun even though he did not see a weapon at the time,” FOX 10 Phoenix reported.
After state prosecutors argued that Hussain was a flight risk because of his frequent trips to Ethiopia, a judge set bail at $200,000 and was placed on electronic monitoring.
As a crypto is becoming a popular source of income Scams have skyrocketed to become a major concern for law enforcement, with nearly 70,000 claims lost to crypto fraud in 2023. The average age of victims of crypto fraud is 60, but experts warn that arrests for this crime are rare.
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