London Man Gets 2.5 Years for SIM-Swap Crypto Theft

The defendant pleaded guilty on 28 September, ten days before sentencing, to conspiracy to commit fraud and transferring criminal property.

A 25-year-old man has been jailed for two and a half years for his involvement in SIM-swap fraud, which saw four people lose £200,000 worth of crypto in November 2021.

According to the City of London Police, Ajay Shinjin, also known as AJ Marley Cruz, received more than £44,000 from the proceeds of crime and used the money on luxurious vacations to Dubai, an expensive apartment, and gold-plated dental grills.

How the Swap Worked and Where the Money Went

It began in early November 2021, when BT spotted unauthorized activity on its systems. Customer phone numbers were being moved onto SIM cards controlled by criminals, a practice known as SIM swapping.

With a number under their control, the fraudsters could receive one-time passcodes by text and use them to get into a victim’s bank account or crypto wallet.

BT then identified the devices receiving the transferred numbers. Each was eSIM-enabled and had two IMEI numbers, the serial codes that identify a handset. Data from the telecommunications company led to several suspects, and Shinjin, aka AJ Marley Cruz, was attributed to four of the devices.

All the victims reported their crimes in the first week of November 2021, and police detailed four thefts, with the first seeing about £40,000 in crypto taken from a victim on November 2, and roughly £27,000 of it landed in Shinjin’s personal crypto account. A second victim lost around £17,000 between November 5 and 7, and all of which was later found in the defendant’s own wallet. The two sums made up the £44,000 he received.

In the other two cases, he helped to carry out the thefts while the money went elsewhere. Some £8,000 left a third victim’s Coinbase account on November 3, and another £130,000 was stolen from a fourth victim on the 6th and 7th of the same month.

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Shinjin was arrested in October 2023 at Heathrow Airport when coming from Dubai, with prosecutors then charging him with one count of conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation and one of transferring criminal property. He entered a guilty plea in late September 2026.

“This was a complex and calculated fraud that caused significant financial harm to a number of victims,” said Detective Constable Simon Ardeman of the City of London Police.

He also called SIM-swap fraud “a sophisticated and increasingly concerning form of offending.” The detective constable added:

“This conviction sends a clear message that those who use technology to commit fraud will be brought to justice.”

An Earlier UK Case

A much larger UK crypto case reached a courtroom roughly a year ago, when Zhimin Qian, a Chinese national, pleaded guilty in late September 2025 to acquiring criminal property in the form of crypto. That case was tied to what is believed to be the world’s largest cryptocurrency seizure: more than 61,000 BTC, worth over £5.5 billion ($7.43 billion).

Qian had defrauded over 128,000 victims in China between 2014 and 2017 before converting the proceeds into BTC. Will Lyne, the Metropolitan Police’s head of economic and cybercrime command, called it one of the largest money laundering cases in UK history.