London SIM-Swap Kingpin Learns Crypto Ain't Tooth-Friendly: 2.5 Years for Grills & Getaways

A 25-year-old London man has been sentenced to two and a half years in prison for his role in a SIM-swap scheme that siphoned roughly £200,000 ($265,000) in cryptocurrency from victims, the City of London Police said Thursday. Ajay Shinjin, also known as AJ Marley Cruz, of Marsh Wall in Canary Wharf, pleaded guilty on September 28 at Inner London Crown Court to conspiracy to commit fraud by false representation and transferring criminal property. He received more than £44,000 of the stolen funds.

Investigators said Shinjin spent his share on luxury holidays in Dubai, a high-end Canary Wharf apartment and gold-plated teeth grills. In a SIM-swap attack, criminals fraudulently transfer a victim's phone number to a SIM card they control, allowing them to intercept one-time passcodes sent by banks and crypto platforms. Early in November 2021, BT identified unauthorized activity on its systems through which customer phone numbers had been moved to criminals' SIMs. Tracing the receiving devices led police to several suspects; Shinjin was linked to four of those devices.

One victim lost about £40,000 in crypto on November 2, 2021, with roughly £27,000 flowing into Shinjin's personal crypto account. A second victim lost about £17,000, all of which ended up in his wallet. He also helped steal about £8,000 from a third victim's Coinbase account and about £130,000 from a fourth. Shinjin was first arrested at his flat in 2021, and re-arrested at Heathrow Airport in October 2023 on his return from Dubai after further evidence emerged. He made no comment in police interviews.

"SIM-swap fraud is a sophisticated and increasingly concerning form of offending, and this case demonstrates the devastating consequences it can have for victims," said Detective Constable Simon Ardeman of the City of London Police. Separately, a Manhattan jury convicted Jonathan Spellata, 36, of Rockville, Maryland, of computer fraud and money laundering on Wednesday over two 2021 hacks of decentralized crypto exchange Uranium Finance, federal prosecutors said.

Unauthorized SIM-swap cases recorded to the UK's National Fraud Database rose 402% in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier, fraud prevention service Cifas reported in August. Norton staff cybersecurity editor Mark Birchall recommends using an authentication app for two-factor authentication rather than SMS, so that account access is tied to a physical device instead of a phone number.