What were you doing when you were 15? If you're like most people, I wager you were probably fighting your way through a Calculus class. But not Ellis Pinsky. At 15, he was stealing money. Lots of it.

A bit of background: Michael Terpin is a crypto investor and VC who's been in crypto for a while. Here's a video of him talking about Bitcoin at a TedX event as far back as 2014. By 2018, he had built a reputation and a fortune.

His holdings were worth tens of millions. And like most successful investors, he was public about it. That visibility put a giant bullseye on his back. But no one—least of all Michael—could have imagined that a 15y/o kid would be the one to pull the trigger.

How did this happen, you may ask? Short answer: a SIM swap. You see, Ellis Pinsky, although 15, belonged to a community of hackers online — OGUsers. One fateful day in 2018, he received a request.

It was from a man named "Harry". He sent him the email and phone number belonging to Michael Terpin. He wanted him to help steal everything tied to them. Ellis accepted.

Immediately, he went to work. First, he reached out to an AT&T employee he had on his payroll — Jahmil Smith, and asked him to reroute Michael's phone number to his own SIM card. With that, he owned every text, call, and 2FA code linked to Michael’s accounts.

Next, he reset Michael's email password and within minutes he had access to years of messages in his inbox. He combed through them and there it was: private keys to Michael's wallets. He contacted Harry and together they drained 3M $TRIG tokens worth $24M at the time.

But there was one problem: converting it to cash. If they moved that much crypto themselves, alarms would go off instantly. So Ellis recruited a small army of middlemen. Each was paid $20–50k to help funnel the stolen tokens through Binance and convert them to Bitcoin.

Most of them did except one — Nicholas Truglia. He held on to $1M worth of $BTC from the exchange. He'd later meet up with Ellis and the two would become pals.

A few weeks later, Nicholas Truglia was arrested, but not for Michael’s heist. He’d been running other SIM swap scams. During the investigation, evidence surfaced linking him to the $24M theft. That trail eventually led Michael to file a lawsuit against both Truglia and Ellis.

In the end, Michael Terpin sued them and AT&T for over $90 million in damages. This is a costly reminder that no one is too big or too smart to be targeted. Here are 3 ways to avoid being a victim of something similar:

1/ Use an authenticator app or hardware key: Consider using an app like Google Authenticator or Authy, or a hardware security key like YubiKey. These methods don’t rely on your phone number, making SIM swap attacks far harder to pull off.

2/ Store seed phrases offline: Keep your seed phrases in a secure physical location like a fireproof safe or metal backup plate. If you must record them digitally, encrypt them and DO NOT STORE THEM IN YOUR EMAIL.

3/ Limit personal info you share: Be mindful of what you post. Your phone number, email, and even photos can help attackers build a profile. The less they know, the harder it is to target you. Privacy is your first line of defense.

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@swipelabscrypto Same people with pencil created eraser

@swipelabscrypto @grok did at&t paid that fine?

@swipelabscrypto @grok are the offenders still in police custody?

@swipelabscrypto That's wild 😲