Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast - This 15-Year-Old Teen Stole $24 Million - The Ellis Pinsky story

Episode Date: April 21, 2025

The Ellis Pinsky scandal centers on a high-profile cryptocurrency theft orchestrated by a teenager. In 2018, at just 15 years old, Pinsky, a high school student from Irvington, New York, masterminded a scheme to steal approximately $24 million in cryptocurrency from investor Michael Terpin.

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But one day, around 2016, he's playing Call of Duty ghosts online. And he's trash talking the other kids like, I'm doing your mom, or whatever they say. and one of the guys he's talking trash to comes back and says, yo, how's the weather in Irvington, which is where Ellis lives? And Ellis is like, oh shit, how does this guy suddenly know where I live? Turns out, this troll just used a free program to figure out Ellis's IP address. It's not really all that complex. But from here on, Ellis becomes fascinated with this ability to track down people's information online.

So for the next few months, he studies the... extensively and he starts learning hacking skills and he eventually joins an online hacking group and over time he learns a skill that's going to make him a bit of money how to steal people's username handles on Twitter and Instagram which probably sounds stupid but there's actually money in this because if you own the Instagram handle like at John then every person named John is gonna want to buy it from you so he learns how to hack people's accounts and steal their handles, and he sells them, and he starts making a little money on the side. However, a few thousand dollars at a time is just not enough for Ellis.

He wants more. And through this hacker group, he learns a way to make millions called sim swapping. And it works like this. Basically, you get someone working at a phone store, like an AT&T store, and you call them and you get them to link someone else's SIM card to your phone number. Once you do that, you have access to everything their phone is connected to, their email, sometimes their bank account. And so Ellis, he starts combing through social media, looking for anyone who posts about working at a cell phone carrier store. Once he finds that person, he reaches out to them and he offers to pay them to connect someone else's SIM card to his phone number. And surprisingly, a ton of these cell phone carrier workers say, I.

And he does this scam for a while. Then, one day in 2018, Ellis is now 15 years old, and someone from his hacker group reaches out to him and asks him specifically to hack this dude. His name's Turpin. And Turpin is an older, rich guy, and he's apparently nearly a billionaire. He has some kind of connection to Match.com or something. So Ellis agrees to hack Turpin, and the next day, he hits up one of his contacts who works at an AT&T phone store in Connecticut, and that contact ports Turpin's SIM card to a phone Ellis can access, and boom, he's in. So he and the other hacker, they start searching through all Turpin stuff,

and that is when they find an email account with a file that holds the keys to a bunch of crypto wallets. Then Ellis and the other hacker, they start opening up these wallets, and they unlock one that has roughly $24 million worth of crypto in it. $24 million. Fucking jackpot. And so, boom, they steal all this crypto. Then they quickly recruit a bunch of their other hacker friends to start selling it off and exchanging it in order to launder it.

One of those guys they recruit to help them is this guy, Nick. And Nick's around 21 years old and he's a party guy. You know, he's kind of a turd himself. But he does help launder the money and he makes sure to keep around a million dollars of that money for himself. because, you know, he's just that kind of guy. Regardless, the heist is officially complete. Ellis and the other hacker, they split the bulk of the loot,

and Ellis ends up with close to $10 million worth of crypto. Meanwhile, Turpin, Turpin, he ain't no dummy. Pretty quickly, he realizes that $24 million in crypto is missing from his wallets, and Bro is pissed, and he vows to figure out who did this to him and take them down. Now, being that Ellis is only 15 years old, he's not going to invest all this new wealth he just got. He's not going to like get a 401k or like diversify his bonds. No, no, he's going to go spend it on some stupid shit. Like he buys a $50,000 watch.

He takes out $100,000 in cash for some reason and he keeps it under his bed. He allegedly starts wearing Louis Vuitton and Supreme brand clothing. He allegedly starts driving an Audi R.A. and renting a private jet to fly to different places. Here's actually a picture of him popping bottles at the club in a club that I guess lets 15-year-olds in. I'm not really sure how he got in, but he's in. Regardless, he's having fun.

And $10 million is a lot of money, and even though he stole it, to his credit, he's pretty sure that this was his last score. After this, no more hacking, no more sim swapping. After this, he is done. Meanwhile, Nick, he took his... his part of the money and he's been living it up too. Here he is popping bottles at the club. Here he is on a private jet. Here he is on a different private jet. Here he is tweeting about his new

diamond watch. Here he is just standing there just looking rich as fuck. So as you can see, these guys are living it up and it seems like they're going to get away with all this. Until, until Nick screws it all up. See, bro isn't the most covert. person in the world when it comes to keeping his crimes a secret. Like here he is tweeting, just a reminder that I sim swapped my own dad. And here he tweets, stole 24 million but can't keep a friend. And here, stole 24 million but can't stay away from drugs. Stole 24 million, still a failure in the eyes of the world. Stole 24 million, still can't stop stealing. Yeah, bro really needs to stop tweeting. Not to mention Nick has no real job. Yet, he's

he appears to the outside world to live this lavish lifestyle. And people around him definitely start to notice this. Like, damn, how's he getting all this money? And so eventually, he gets on the radar of a federal task force whose job it is to investigate these kinds of crimes. And so they start investigating him for a different million-dollar sim swapping heist. And bam, they arrest him. Here's his mugshot.

And because they're investigating him for this, they search his iCloud backup file and through this, they connect him to the $24 million in crypto that he and Ellis stole from Turpin. Now, from here, I don't know if Nick flips on Ellis. I mean, he probably does. I actually don't think they were very close friends in real life. I think they're just two hackers who happen to know each other. But what I do know is that somehow Turpin, the older rich guy, he learns that Ellis was one of the ones who stole all this money from him. And he definitely isn't going to let that slide. So a few months later, Ellis's mom randomly gets an email, and it's from Turpin's lawyer. And it's all about the crypto heise, and it accuses her son Ellis of being the mastermind behind it, and he's

threatening to sue. And so Ellis's mom, she goes to Ellis, and they get a lawyer, and they come up with a plan for Ellis to cooperate. So Ellis, he ends up cooperating with the feds, and he pleads guilty to embezzlement to try and get a lesser charge. He also tries to settle things with Turpin. He like gives back everything he got from the heist, 562 Bitcoin, the $50,000 watch, the $100,000 in cash that he kept under his bed. But, you know, Turpin sues him anyway. I mean, yeah, I would too. But regardless, at the end of it all, Nick gets sentenced to 18 months in prison. While Ellis, he actually gets no prison time because he cooperated with the feds. and also because he was only 15 at the time of the crime.

So, bro stole $24 million and he gets no prison time. Lucky bastard.