Who Is the Twenty-Something Man Who Blew $800,000 a Day on Ferraris and Hermes Bags in Nightclubs?

Singaporean Stole 4,100 Bitcoins in the U.S.
Owned 30 Luxury Cars, Lived Lavishly in Miami

A man in his twenties from Singapore, known for flaunting his wealth by driving 30 luxury cars and handing out designer bags at nightclubs, has admitted in a U.S. court to stealing Bitcoin worth nearly 300 billion won.

According to NBC and CNN on September 9 (local time), the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Melon Lam, a Singaporean accused of being the main perpetrator in a cryptocurrency fraud case valued at $245 million (approximately 328 billion won), appeared in federal district court in Washington, DC the previous day and pleaded guilty. Lam is one of 18 individuals indicted in the case. After further trials, he could face up to 30 years in prison.

This case is considered the largest cryptocurrency theft in U.S. history. Lam dropped out of middle school in Singapore and moved to the United States in 2023, where he remained even after his visa expired. He is accused of working with accomplices he met through an online gaming platform to deceive a victim living in Washington, DC in August 2024 and steal 4,100 Bitcoins.

Lam and his two accomplices allegedly posed as Google Cloud staff and employees of Gemini, a U.S. cryptocurrency platform, to approach the victim. They told the victim there had been "an unauthorized attempt to access your account." When the victim fell for the ruse, the group successively obtained access to Google Cloud, the victim’s PC, and the private keys to their Bitcoin wallet, eventually stealing 4,100 Bitcoins.

Afterwards, they enjoyed an extravagant lifestyle in Los Angeles (LA) and Miami, but were arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) just one month after the crime, in September 2024.

Lam rented a luxury residence in Miami and purchased more than 30 high-end cars, including Porsche, Lamborghini, and Ferrari models. According to the FBI, luxury watches worth over $500,000 and high-end clothing valued at tens of thousands of dollars were found in his home. Lam also squandered millions of dollars at nightclubs. One night at a nightclub in LA, he spent $569,000 (about 760 million won). At that time, Lam made a spectacle by purchasing several Hermes Birkin bags, each worth tens of thousands of dollars, and tossing them to people at a nightclub party.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.