It’s hard to say which of Malone Lam’s criminal spending sprees sealed his fate. It might have been the 31 luxury cars, the handful of rented Miami mansions or the $569,525 nightclub tab in Los Angeles, where he threw expensive handbags into crowds.
As lavish as it was, his extravagant lifestyle was short-lived. Mr. Lam, 22, a citizen of Singapore known by aliases such as “Anne Hathaway,” pleaded guilty to a racketeering and conspiracy charge in Federal District Court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.
“This defendant led an international network that preyed on victims through deception, invaded their privacy and stole hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency,” Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, said in a statement on Tuesday.
Federal prosecutors arrested Mr. Lam in September 2024, after he and a group of associates pulled off one of the largest Bitcoin heists in U.S. history. The enterprise took place between fall 2023 and spring 2025, with Mr. Lam and the group stealing and laundering cryptocurrency valued at more than $245 million.
The group, led by Mr. Lam, largely met on online gaming platforms, according to court documents. They used social engineering, the practice of deceiving or manipulating someone to obtain confidential information, to defraud cryptocurrency holders out of hundreds of millions of dollars. In one instance, in August 2024, they talked one Bitcoin investor out of more than $240 million.
Members of the group went on a monthlong spending spree that year, prosecutors said, taking trips on private jets and buying Porsches, Mercedes-Benz G Wagons, Rolls Royces, diamond jewelry, luxury watches and firearms. By September, Mr. Lam and two co-conspirators had been arrested.
The men would try to log in to targets’ accounts, prompting security alerts. This provided believable pretext for the hackers to call the targets, claiming to be security specialists. They would then coax passwords and access to accounts from victims and drain their cryptocurrency holdings, court documents said.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are digital tokens that can be exchanged online and are not overseen by a central authority. Transactions are verified through cryptography and recorded in a public ledger, called a blockchain. Much of the group’s activities were shielded by virtual private networks, or VPNs.
Mr. Lam arrived in the United States on the visa waiver program in October 2023 and overstayed as he lived an opulent lifestyle on stolen funds.
“As I was listening to the evidence, I could only think of Ferris Bueller gone bad,” Judge Alicia O. Valle said at one of Mr. Lam’s earlier court hearings, referring to the 1986 film character.
The group’s lavish spending quickly attracted the attention of law enforcement. Hasty efforts to launder stolen funds through various cash exchanges led to their downfall, and they were tracked after one of Mr. Lam’s co-conspirators failed to use a VPN when creating an account on a digital currency exchange.
Mr. Lam faces up to 20 years in prison.
“We always talked about what it would be like if I were to go down,” he was heard saying on a recorded line from jail not long after his arrest. “But never thought it would be this crazy.”
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