By day, he was an average suburban soccer-playing, algebra-taking 15-year-old. By night, he was one of the world's most fearsome hackers. Read how a 'Baby Al Capone' pulled off a $23.8 million crypto heist and has been paying the price ever since.
A bedroom community 20 miles up the Hudson River from New York City, Irvington’s whole point is to be a place of calm, not calamity, a place where white-collar families can disperse themselves sparsely in well-appointed homes with river vistas and two-car garages. There are good public schools. There is a historic Main Street that runs up from the water, a parade of American flags suspended from buildings that look as though they were plucked from a Christmas village.
He knew — or, at least, was pretty sure he knew — why the men were there, breaking into his family home at 4 a.m. Two years earlier, on Jan. 7, 2018, when he was 15 years old, Pinsky had pulled off a heist of $23.8 million, one of the largesthacks of its kind ever executed. Two weeks before the break-in, a lawsuit had been filed against him, and news stories had circulated connecting him to the hack. He knew that the thieves wanted this money, the millions and millions of dollars he had stolen.
He immediately logged off. But he almost as immediately realized that this was the next level of the game. This was leveling up. Asking around to other gamers, he soon learned that a free program called Wireshark could be installed that “sniffed out” incoming network connections and identified their internet protocol addresses. A quick Google search of an IP address would tell you approximately where it was coming from. It seemed a revelation to Pinsky.
Soon, he says, he was making his way up the ranks of the OGUser community, finding that his skills would quickly surpass those of whatever mentor he took on. “I’ve always been an autodidact, always been very persistent,” he tells me. He was adept at social engineering — personable and clever, with a voice like he knew his way around Cupertino — but he also had an ease with the more technical side of hacking.
dentity — at least for a time — a prospect so enticing that he began to seek a more efficient way to go about it than tricking guileless employees at Verizon or AT&T. He wrote a Python script to comb through social media networks In early 2018, someone with the username Harry reached out to Pinsky and asked if he could hack an AT&T phone, which, of course, he could. According to Pinsky’s account, Harry said he had a target he thought was good. Michael Terpin, then 60, was a heavyweight in theworld. An early tech enthusiast, he’d helmed a PR firm that repped America Online and launched the Motley Fool, Match.com, and Earthlink.
Part of that has to do with the enormous sum — it is known to be the largest SIM-swapping hack pulled off by an individual . The sheer volume of crypto — and the limits crypto exchanges put on daily transactions — meant it would take more people to launder the coins. And more people meant more loose ends, more chances that someone would talk.
After that, Pinsky says, his life didn’t change much. At least not at first. For a while, he half-expected the FBI to knock on his door at any moment, just like in the movies; but as time passed, he grew less anxious. He spent $50,000 worth of bitcoin on a Patek Philippe watch and took out about $100,000 in cash, which he kept under his bed in a $40 safe he’d ordered on Amazon. On a trip back from Chicago with his mom, he paid $870 for them to take an empty leg flight on a private jet.
Pinsky was right to be unsettled by Truglia . On Nov. 14, 2018, members of the Regional Enforcement Allied Computer Team high-tech task force arrested Truglia at his Manhattan apartment after a $1 million SIM-swapping heist he’d helped conduct a few weeks earlier. While searching his iCloud backup file, investigators found evidence that he’d also been involved in stealing Michael Terpin’s $23.
Actually, he wanted much more. He wanted $71.4 million, and he believed he was entitled to it under the RICO Act, which allows for treble damages in cases of organized crime. Terpin has long argued that that is what cyber gangs are. “You know, in a bank robbery, you got a guy with a gun, a guy who cases the joint, a guy in the getaway car,” he says. “Everybody’s got a job. Same thing in a SIM-swap gang. Once they get control of your cell, they go in and have a gang of programmers.
Crypto impresario Michael Terpin wants Pinsky charged under RICO. “In a bank robbery, you got a guy with a gun, a guy who cases the joint, a guy in the getaway car,” he says. “Everybody’s got a job. Same thing in a SIM-swap gang.”That is all possible. “A big part of these cases is trying to recover the funds, and there’s no way of knowing if you’ve gotten them all,” says Erin West, the deputy district attorney for REACT, the high-tech task force that arrested Truglia.
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