Three Men Banged Up for £4M Fake-Cop Crypto Heist — Funds Laundered Into Rolexes and Hermès Bags 👮

Three men have been sentenced at Southwark Crown Court for a £4 million ($5.3 million) cryptocurrency fraud in which they impersonated UK police officers to extract coins from eight victims. The Metropolitan Police said the group contacted targets by phone, claimed their crypto was at risk, and instructed them to share account credentials or transfer funds to wallets the victims believed were secure police accounts. The defendants had built convincing fake police websites, and stolen coins were moved through a complex laundering network.

Anthony Ikenwe, 29, and Kevin Nwamma, 25, were each sentenced on Thursday to six years for conspiracy to commit fraud and five years for money laundering, to run concurrently. Hamza Bashir, 23, received three years and nine months for fraud and three years for laundering, also concurrent. Ikenwe and Nwamma pleaded guilty in April, while Bashir denied involvement, stood trial, and changed his plea on the eighth day after being shown extensive evidence.

Investigators found the men living well beyond any recorded income. One had a documented income of just £444 a year, yet the group purchased a car worth nearly £60,000 in crypto, stored approximately £500,000 in cash in a Dubai safety deposit box, and traveled to Thailand, Japan, Paris, Mykonos, the Maldives and the Seychelles. They shopped at Harrods, Hermès and Louis Vuitton, routinely converting crypto into prepaid payment cards. Officers linked more than £1 million in crypto to wallets controlled by Ikenwe and traced stolen funds into bank accounts tied to Nwamma's luxury chauffeur business; luxury goods recovered were valued at more than £26,000.

The case opened in January 2025 when victims came forward. The Met's Cryptocurrency Team said it used blockchain transactions, exchange records, communications, financial records and internet service provider data to connect what initially appeared to be separate crimes into a single organized network operating across multiple platforms and jurisdictions. In November, officers raided seven addresses across London and Essex, arresting the three men and seizing luxury goods, cryptocurrency and 40 mobile phones, recovering around £1 million tied to victims.

"This was a highly complex investigation into a group of calculated manipulators who exploited victims' trust by pretending to be police officers," Detective Inspector Geoff Donoghue of the Met's Cryptocurrency Team said, adding that "Criminals should be under no illusion—policing is evolving alongside technology." Impersonation of police has emerged as a recurring tactic in crypto crime, with a separate case last year in which a scammer posing as UK police stole $2.8 million in Bitcoin ($BTC) from a victim's hardware wallet.