THE CRYPTO KILLERS

The money was real. The blockchain was permanent. And the people who stole billions were hiding in plain sight.

In 2016, a Bulgarian woman in a sequined gown stood before eleven thousand cheering investors at Wembley Arena and told them she had built the future of money. She raised $4.5 billion. Her coin had no blockchain. She has never been found.

In 2022, a thirty-year-old MIT graduate in shorts and a beanbag chair collapsed the world's third-largest cryptocurrency exchange overnight, leaving over a million customers unable to access their funds. He is serving twenty-five years in federal prison.

In 2024, North Korea's state-sponsored hacking division stole $1.34 billion in a single year - funding a nuclear weapons program with money taken from ordinary investors in Japan, India, and the United States.

These are not isolated incidents. They are the defining crimes of the digital money age.

In The Crypto Killers, investigative author Dr. James Pennington goes inside the biggest frauds, heists, and human tragedies that cryptocurrency has produced - tracing the money, the people, and the systems that made each crime possible, and asking what it all reveals about the technology that was supposed to change everything.

From the pig butchering compounds of Cambodia and Myanmar - where 220,000 trafficked workers send love messages at gunpoint to lonely Americans - to the French countryside where the co-founder of the world's largest hardware wallet manufacturer lost a finger in a kidnapping designed to extract his Bitcoin, Pennington documents a criminal landscape that is simultaneously more sophisticated and more human than any headline has captured.

Inside, you'll discover:

• The full story of OneCoin - how Ruja Ignatova built a $4.5 billion ghost coin, who warned her the FBI was coming, and what the competing theories about her fate actually say
• The mechanics of the FTX fraud - the hidden code that gave Alameda Research unlimited access to customer funds, the seven false balance sheets, the $150 million bribe to Chinese officials, and what Caroline Ellison said about Sam Bankman-Fried's hair
• The pig butchering industry - how it grew 85-fold in four years, the industrial compounds where workers are tortured into sending romance messages, and the lonely Americans who lost everything to a wrong-number text
• North Korea's Lazarus Group - the $1.5 billion Bybit hack, the fake LinkedIn recruiter who brought down a Japanese exchange, and how Kim Jong Un funds his nuclear program with stolen cryptocurrency
• The $5 wrench attack - why physical violence against cryptocurrency holders has tripled since 2022, and what the kidnappers in Vienna, SoHo, and Toronto reveal about the fundamental vulnerability of self-custody wealth
• The Africrypt brothers - two South African siblings, aged 18 and 21, who allegedly vanished with $3.6 billion and returned, years later, to a gated estate as though nothing had happened
• The blockchain forensics revolution - how ZachXBT, Chainalysis, and the IRS Cyber Unit are building the tools to follow money that criminals believe they have made unfollowable

Penny for penny, victim for victim, The Crypto Killers is the definitive account of the decade of digital fraud - a book about technology that is, ultimately, about the oldest question in the history of money: who do you trust, and why?

Dr. James Pennington is the author of The Gardner Heist and The Villisca Axe Murders. He writes about financial crime, unsolved cases, and the intersection of technology and human behavior.