Phoenix man sentenced for $1.1M cryptocurrency fraud
Nov 13, 2018, 4:35 PM | Updated: Aug 18, 2023, 7:11 pm
(Pexels Photo)
(Pexels Photo)
PHOENIX – A Phoenix man was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison last week for misappropriating $1.1 million in cryptocurrency.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Northern District of Illinois announced the sentencing of 24-year-old Joseph Kim on Tuesday.
He’d been charged earlier this year and pleaded guilty to one count of wire fraud in May.
The Chicago Sun-Times reported that Kim now works at Home Depot and is pursuing a computer science degree at Arizona State University. He was allowed to delay reporting to prison until May 1 so he can complete his first year at ASU.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Kim was working as an assistant trader for Chicago’s Consolidated Trading LLC when he misappropriated at least $600,000 in Bitcoin and Litecoin.
The charges said he transferred company funds to his personal accounts to cover trading losses over a two-month period in 2017.
After he was dismissed from that job, Kim moved back to Arizona and convinced friends and people they knew to give him money to trade in cryptocurrency on their behalf.
He sent them false account statements that showed his trading was profitable, but he actually lost $545,000 of their investments.
Four of the victims testified during a sentencing hearing before U.S. District Judge Andrea R. Wood in Chicago on Friday.
It was the first criminal prosecution in Chicago involving cryptocurrency trading.
“It is important that the public know that despite the complexity of cryptocurrency trading, the criminal justice system will hold traders and investment professionals accountable for cheating and stealing,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Sunil Harjani and Sheri Mecklenburg wrote in the sentencing memorandum.
