Marc Merrill, the co-founder of Riot Games, well known for the game League of Legends, was defrauded of over $15 million in a crypto mining scam. According to a court filing discovered by Forbes, Merrill’s credit card details ware used to purchase cloud computing from Amazon for the purpose of mining cryptocurrencies.

A Singaporean national, Matthew Ho, has been identified by the investigation team as the culprit behind this crime. According to the authorities, Ho has been operating his crypto fraudulent activities since at least 2014. They claim he has been mining Bitcoin and Ethereum using Amazon and Google servers.

The serial scammer was eventually noticed in January 2018 but it was after he had racked up bills totaling $5 million on Amazon’s web service.

However, the court documents couldn’t specify how Ho was able to obtain Merrill’s credit card details. And it was just recently that Merrill was identified as the victim of this fraudulent act.

Meanwhile, Ho was able to deceive Amazon that he was indeed Merrill. He even went to the extent of creating a fake Californian driver’s license and email address that appeared to be a legitimate Gmail for Merrill.

Ho used the same Gmail address to sign up for Google’s cloud services and made a total of 16 separate payments to Google on Merrill’s Amex card.

The mined cryptocurrency was being sold at localbitcoins.net. But eventually, through IP addresses and login information provided by Amazon, Google and others, authorities were able to arrest Ho.

Featured image courtesy of Shutterstock.