Poker Player Busted for $500,000 Bitcoin Trading Scam

07:26
01 Apr

A poker player has been arrested and charged in Las Vegas over a $500k Bitcoin scam. 23-year-old Filippos Liakounakos is accused of cheating a cryptocurrency trader back in 2020 for the amount and is now facing jail time on charges of identity theft, theft of more than $100k, and an unlawful felony act involving electronic mail or transmission of computer data.

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Bitcoin Scam

The victim told police that he agreed to a Bitcoin transaction with a business associate on the encrypted mobile chat app Telegram, but found out a day later that an imposter had been posing as the associate and he had sent the huge sum to somebody else.

The police were soon involved and began tracking the transaction on the public blockchain which was moving rapidly to disguise where the cryptocurrency was going in a process known as “peeling”.

A month later, Liakounakos couldn’t help himself and got greedy, wondering if he could pull off the same stunt twice with the same victim, but now for an eye-watering $999,900 in Bitcoin. This time around the victim was able to obtain an email address from Liakounakos who was later tracked down by law enforcement and busted.

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Previous Form?

This isn’t the first time that university student Filippos Liakounakos has been linked with a six-figure scam. Back in May 2020, a thread appeared on the Poker Fraud Alert forum naming him as the guy who ripped off Cord Garcia, the winner of the 2015 WSOP Colossus, for $600k.

Filippos was described by Ryan Feldman as "the tall young Greek kid who plays PLO".

“Cord Garcia is best known for his 1st place finish in the massive-field WSOP Colossus event in 2015, for $638k. I met him in 2018 at a $1500 NL event, and he was nice/friendly. Liked the kid. Anyway, this came out because Fleyshman decided to use the visibility of the Perkins drama to create some of his own for Filippos. Not sure if the claim is true, and Fleyshman has been known to stretch the truth, but my gut feeling is that this is true or mostly true.“

There was also a thread on the Two Plus Two forum accusing Liakounakos of owing $12,500 on the private club site Kings Club. Apparently, he felt cheated and refused to settle the bill.

For now, Filippos Liakounakos is once again a free man. For the time being anyway. Clark County Chief Deputy District Attorney Jim Sweetin set bail at $250,000, and got it, stating that Liakounakos is a flight risk because he has no connection to Las Vegas. We await the next hearing to find out when a trial date has been set for.