A 25-year-old man has been jailed for two and a half years for his involvement in a SIM swap fraud, which saw four people lose £200,000 worth of crypto in November 2021.
According to City of London Police, Ajay Shinjin, also known as AJ Marley Cruz, received more than £44,000 from the proceeds of crime and used the money on luxury holidays in Dubai, an expensive apartment and gold-plated dental grills.
How the exchange worked and where the money went
He began in early November 2021, when BT spotted unauthorized activity on its systems. Customers’ phone numbers were transferred to SIM cards controlled by criminals, a practice known as SIM swapping.
With a number under their control, fraudsters could receive one-time access codes via SMS and use them to access a victim’s bank account or crypto wallet.
BT then identified the devices receiving the transferred numbers. Each was eSIM compatible and had two IMEI numbers, the serial codes that identify a handset. Data from the telecommunications company led to several suspects, and Shinjin, aka AJ Marley Cruz, was traced to four of the devices.
All victims reported their crimes in the first week of November 2021, and police detailed four thefts, the first of which saw around £40,000 worth of cryptocurrencies stolen from one victim on November 2, and around £27,000 of that landed in Shinjin’s personal crypto account. A second victim lost around £17,000 between November 5 and 7, which was later found in the defendant’s wallet. The two sums made up the £44,000 he received.
In the other two cases, he helped carry out the thefts while the money went elsewhere. Some £8,000 left a third victim’s Coinbase account on November 3, and a further £130,000 was stolen from a fourth victim on the 6th and 7th of the same month.
Shinjin was arrested in October 2023 at Heathrow Airport while flying from Dubai, with prosecutors subsequently charging him with one count of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation and one count of transferring criminal property. He pleaded guilty at the end of September 2026.
“This was a complex and calculated fraud which caused significant financial harm to a number of victims,” said Detective Constable Simon Ardeman of the City of London Police.
He also called SIM swap fraud a “sophisticated and increasingly worrying form of crime”. The detective agent added:
“This conviction sends a clear message that those who use technology to commit fraud will be brought to justice. »
A previous case in the United Kingdom
A much larger UK crypto case came to court about a year ago, when Zhimin Qian, a Chinese national, pleaded guilty in late September 2025 to acquiring criminal property in crypto. The case was linked to what is believed to be the world’s largest cryptocurrency seizure: more than 61,000 BTC, worth more than £5.5 billion ($7.43 billion).
Qian defrauded more than 128,000 victims in China between 2014 and 2017 before converting the profits into BTC. Will Lyne, head of the Metropolitan Police’s economic and cybercrime command, called it one of the biggest money laundering cases in UK history.
The article London Man Gets 2.5 Years for SIM-Swap Crypto Theft appeared first on CryptoPotato.
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