Marc Merrill, the millionaire co-founder of Riot Games and co-creator of League of Legends, was defrauded of more than $15 million in a crypto mining scam involving Amazon Cloud services.
According to court documents obtained by Forbes, Merrill’s American Express credit card information was used to buy cloud computing from Amazon for the purpose of remotely mining crypto-assets.
Matthew Ho, a Singaporean national, was identified by authorities as the criminal behind the fraudulent purchases. Ho has been operating his crypto scam since at least 2014, using Amazon and Google servers to mine bitcoin and ethereum. Ho was eventually discovered in January 2018, but not before racking up $5 million in bills on Amazon’s web service.
The court documents fail to specify how Ho was able to obtain Merrill’s credit card information, as the Riot Games founder was only recently identified as the victim of the case. However, Ho was able to trick Amazon into believing that he was Merrill, going so far as to create a fake Californian driver’s license and email address.
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