Ajay Shinjin Jailed 2.5 Years Over £200,000 Bitcoin (BTC) SIM-Swap Theft

Jailed Over a £200,000 SIM-Swap Ring

Londoner Ajay Shinjin, who helped a gang drain almost £200,000 ($264,200) in cryptocurrency from four BT customers, was jailed for two and a half years on Thursday at Inner London Crown Court, as the City of London Police announcement records. The 25-year-old, also known as AJ Marley Cruz and living on Marsh Wall in Canary Wharf, pleaded guilty on September 28 to conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation and to transferring criminal property. The file began in early November 2021, when BT detected unauthorized activity on its systems: customer phone numbers had been moved onto SIM cards the criminals controlled. A SIM swap places a victim's number on a card held by a thief, who then intercepts the one-time passcodes that banks and any crypto exchange send by text. BT's engineers traced the devices receiving the hijacked numbers, eSIM handsets carrying two IMEI numbers each, and investigators connected Shinjin to four of them. Four victims surfaced. One lost about £40,000 on November 2, 2021, and roughly £27,000 of it flowed into Shinjin's personal crypto account. A second victim's entire loss of about £17,000, taken between November 5 and 7, later turned up in the same wallet. A third had roughly £8,000 pulled from a Coinbase account on November 3 in a theft Shinjin facilitated before the money moved on. The heaviest loss fell on a fourth victim, who lost some £130,000 in crypto between November 6 and 7. Shinjin kept more than £44,000 ($58,124) of the proceeds and spent it on holidays in Dubai, a luxury flat in Canary Wharf and gold-plated teeth grills. Police first arrested him at his flat in 2021, then again in October 2023 as he landed at Heathrow from Dubai; he answered no questions in interview. Whatever the Bitcoin (BTC) price does next, the case file shows no blockchain exploit was ever needed.

UK SIM-Swap Cases Up 402%

The technique is now spreading well beyond one courtroom. Cifas, the UK fraud-prevention service, reported in August 2026 that unauthorized SIM-swap cases logged in its National Fraud Database rose 402% in the first half of the year against the same stretch of 2025. That jump puts a 2021-style phone hijack among the fastest-growing fraud categories in the country. The attack needs no malware and no smart-contract bug: a criminal ports the victim's number to a SIM they hold, then reads the one-time codes that banks and trading platforms send by SMS. Once those codes are captured, strong passwords stop mattering, because the recovery path that guards a wallet's private keys usually runs through the phone number itself. Two of the BT victims lost their balances within days of the numbers being ported, which is how quickly the window opens. The Shinjin conviction also closes a file that ran more than four years from detection to sentencing, a reminder of how slowly telecom-fraud prosecutions move. Shinjin himself stayed silent through both interviews, leaving the device records and wallet flows to carry the identification. The defenses are known: authenticator apps instead of text codes, physical security keys, a separate PIN on the mobile carrier account, and extra identity checks on porting requests. Enforcement is widening too. Four suspects were arrested in Poland on June 25 with assistance from the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, accused of draining crypto exchange accounts through SIM-swap attacks. In May, ten people in England were charged in a phone scam whose callers posed as police officers and crypto company staff to obtain seed phrases, with at least one victim losing £300,000.

Hardware Keys, Not SIM Codes

The lesson here sits in the plumbing, not the chain. None of the four losses in the BT case involved a broken smart contract or a leaked key from cold storage; every pound left through an exchange or platform account whose second factor was a text message. A two-and-a-half-year sentence restores some deterrence, yet a 402% rise in reported cases says the attack still pays, and no exchange-side setting can fix a breach at the carrier. Anyone planning to HODL for years should move long-term holdings into self-custody, where the key never depends on a phone number, and secure day-to-day trading with hardware keys or payment cards such as Tangem Pay. When picking among the Best Crypto Exchanges, hardware-key support deserves the same weight as fees.