Recently a poker player (pictured) was charged in Las Vegas for allegedly swindling a novice cryptocurrency trader for as much as $500,000 in in 2020.
In the last days, 23-year-old Filippos Liakounakos was sized and faces three felony charges in Las Vegas Justice Court: theft of more than $100,000, obtaining or using another person's identity to cause a financial loss of more than $30,000, and an unlawful felony act involving electronic mail or transmission of computer data, according to court records.
The victim, whose name is blacked out in an arrest warrant for Liakounakos, had notified authorities in November 2020 that he was the victim of a bitcoin scam.
The victim told police that he was approached by a business associate on the encrypted mobile chat app Telegram and agreed to a bitcoin transaction. The victim allegedly transferred $500,000 in bitcoin, including a $50,000 seller's fee.
The next day, the victim contacted the business associate to learn that they had not been aware of the transaction and the money had been sent to an imposter, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
In the warrant for Liakounakos's arrest, a detective stated that he reviewed the transaction on the public blockchain "and observed the BTC (bitcoin) being moved rapidly in what is commonly known as ‘peeling’ to obfuscate where the BTC was going."
The following month, the victim was contacted by the imposter again, who proposed a bitcoin transaction of just under one million. The victim obtained an email from the imposter, which allowed police to issue an arrest warrant for Liakounakos.
A few months before the victim told police about the bitcoin scam, a poker forum was discussing an alleged six-figure scam by a poker player named Filippos Liakounakos, who was described as "the tall young Greek kid who plays PLO."
In May 2020, Poker Fraud Alert founder Todd Witteles posted a thread titled "Dan Fleyshman claims that Colossus winner Cord Garcia was ripped off of $600k by Filippos Liakounakos."
"Cord Garcia is best known for his 1st place finish in the massive-field WSOP Colossus event in 2015, for $638k. I met him in 2018 at a $1500 NL event, and he was nice/friendly. Liked the kid," Witteles wrote in the thread, which includes an embedded tweet that has since been deleted.
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