An Arizona man posing as an Uber driver was arrested after being accused of stealing close to $300,000 in crypto from unsuspecting passengers, NBC News reports.
Officers of the Scottsdale Police Department took 40-year-old Nuruhussein Hussein into custody on Dec. 11 to face felony charges of theft, fraud, and money laundering.
In a collaborative effort with the United States Secret Service field office in Phoenix, police found evidence of Hussein pretending to be an Uber driver between March and December 2024, picking up people who called for a real Uber driver outside of a local hotel. Once the passengers were inside, he would ask them to use their phones for directions.
With the phone in hand, authorities say, Hussein was able to transfer a combined $223,000 in crypto from the victims’ Coinbase accounts by phone-to-phone transfer or phone to cold storage.
“While manipulating the unsuspecting victim’s phone, the suspect transferred cryptocurrency from their digital wallet to his digital wallet,” Scottsdale police said in a statement.
Court documents reveal one victim’s story of asking for their phone back and Hussein providing a troubling answer. “He made threats to one of the victims that they needed to chill or something bad would happen, and the victim believed that he had a gun, although he did not see a weapon at that time,” FOX 10 Phoenix reported.
As a result of state prosecutors arguing Hussein was a flight risk due to frequent trips to Ethiopia, a judge set a secure bond of $200,000 and to be under electronic monitoring.
As crypto becomes a popular source of income in the United States, fraud has increased drastically, becoming a major concern for law enforcement. With close to 70,000 complaints, $5.6 billion in crypto was lost due to fraud in 2023. The average age of a victim of crypto fraud is 60, but experts warn that arrests connected to this crime are rare.
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