In a shocking case involving a huge financial mistake, Australian officials want to send to prison a Crypto.com user who got almost $7 million by accident and spent most of it before the cryptocurrency exchange realized what had happened.
In May 2021, Crypto.com sent 10.47 million Australian dollars (about $6.86 million USD) to an Australian couple named Thevamanogari Manivel and Jatinder Singh instead of a small return of 100 Australian dollars. An employee allegedly typed an account number into the payment section of an Excel spreadsheet, which led to the significant overpayment.
Prosecutor Demands Jail Time
Seven months had passed by the time the mistake was found during an internal check in December 2021. Singh had already invested the money in several properties and given a friend a million Australian dollars as a gift. Singh said he thought he had won “an online raffle.”
Prosecutor Campbell Thomson said that the large amount of money involved made it more than just a crime of opportunity at the most recent court meeting on August 2, which was almost three years after the crime. It was his opinion that Singh should go to jail.
“It may not be that you send him to jail for very long at all after taking into account his presentence detention,” Thomson noted.
Martin Kozlowski, Singh’s lawyer, said that Singh didn’t fully understand how serious the situation was, which he said would have been hard for anyone to understand.
“It must be taken into account that the funds here came from a multinational that didn’t even know the funds were gone until an audit sometime later,” Kozlowski said. “Nobody knows how they would respond if faced with the same situation.”
In March 2023, prosecutors said that Singh was fleeing the country for money reasons because only $4.9 million had been found, and some of that money had already been sent abroad.
Singh is going to get his sentence in September. Following a guilty plea to recklessly handling the proceeds of crime, his partner, Manivel, was given a prison sentence of about seven months (time already spent) and an 18-month community corrections order in September 2023.
This case shows that there are more and more crimes in Australia that involve cryptography. The latest Money Laundering National Risk Assessment from the Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) came out on July 15. It showed that criminals are using cryptocurrency and services related to them more. AUSTRAC thinks that these kinds of activities will continue to rise because cryptocurrencies make transactions more private and faster.
