Three men jailed after posing as police to steal £4M ($5.3M) in crypto — then blew the proceeds on Rolexes, designer goods and luxury holidays
Three men have been sentenced in London after a £4 million cryptocurrency fraud in which they impersonated police officers to trick victims into handing over crypto. The Metropolitan Police say the trio targeted eight people, persuading them to share account details or transfer assets into what they were told were secure “police” accounts — only for the coins to be siphoned off through an elaborate laundering network.
How the scam worked
- Callers claiming to be police warned victims their cryptocurrency was at risk and urged immediate action. The group also built convincing fake police websites to add legitimacy.
- Once transferred, funds were moved quickly through multiple wallets and converted into cash, prepaid payment cards and luxury purchases, making recovery difficult.
Sentences and seizure
- At Southwark Crown Court on Thursday, 29-year-old Anthony Ikenwe and 25-year-old Kevin Nwamma were each jailed — six years for conspiracy to commit fraud and five years for money laundering, to run concurrently.
- Hamza Bashir, 23, received concurrent sentences of three years and nine months for fraud and three years for money laundering.
- Police arrested the suspects after November raids on seven addresses across London and Essex, seizing cryptocurrency, luxury goods (valued at more than £26,000), around 40 mobile phones and other evidence. Officers recovered about £1 million that could be tied to victims.
Lifestyle far beyond declared means
Detectives say the trio lived well beyond their reported incomes. One defendant had a recorded annual income of just £444 but the group bought a nearly £60,000 car with crypto, kept roughly £500,000 in cash in a Dubai safety deposit box and splashed out on holidays to Thailand, Japan, Paris, Mykonos, the Maldives and the Seychelles. They’d also been shopping at Harrods, Hermès and Louis Vuitton. Investigators linked more than £1 million in crypto to wallets controlled by Ikenwe, and traced stolen funds into bank accounts connected to Nwamma’s luxury chauffeur business.
Investigation: blockchain analysis meets old-fashioned detective work
The case began when victims reported the fraud in January 2025. The Met’s dedicated Cryptocurrency Team says it stitched together on-chain transactions, exchange records, communications, financial data and ISP logs to link what initially looked like separate crimes into a single organised network operating across platforms and borders. “This was a highly complex investigation into a group of calculated manipulators who exploited victims’ trust by pretending to be police officers,” Detective Inspector Geoff Donoghue said, adding that policing is evolving alongside technology.
A growing scourge in crypto fraud
Impersonating law enforcement has become a recurring tactic in crypto crime. The Met noted parallels with last year’s UK case in which a scammer posing as police stole $2.8 million in Bitcoin from a hardware wallet. In the US, fraudsters posing as Denver police convinced a woman to feed cash into a Bitcoin ATM over a fake jury-duty scheme; in France and Ukraine, attackers have even used live impersonation and threats to seize crypto by force.
Next steps
The Met said it continues to work with UK and international partners to identify others connected to the conspiracy and to recover assets for victims. The case underlines both the risks faced by crypto holders and the growing effectiveness of blockchain-focused policing — but also highlights the need for ongoing user education and vigilance against increasingly sophisticated social-engineering scams.
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