A decide has sentenced Australian citizen Kathryn Nguyen to a most time of two years and three months in jail for her position in stealing greater than 100,000 XRP tokens in January 2019.

According to an Aug. 11 report in Australian publication Information Age, Nguyen was sentenced over the theft of greater than $300,000 in XRP two years in the past. She was initially charged in Oct. 2019 and pled responsible to fraud costs the next August.

Chris Craigie, the decide presiding over Nguyen’s case, mentioned it was a “difficult and troubling decision” to ship her to jail. The Australian nationwide will reportedly be eligible for parole in October 2021.

First Australian crypto fraud case

Nguyen was one of many first individuals to be charged with the theft of crypto property in Australia.

In January 2019, she reportedly hacked into the e-mail of a 56-year-old man with the identical final identify as her and stole all his XRP holdings earlier than releasing management of the account two days later. This was at a time when the crypto asset was close to its all-time excessive of $3.84.

Nguyen reportedly transferred the XRP holdings to a Chinese crypto trade the place she swapped the tokens for Bitcoin (BTC), sending them to a number of wallets in what could have been an try and launder the funds. According to native information outlet 7News Sydney, authorities in China have been solely in a position to get well roughly $9,000.

XRP falls out of favor

The worth of XRP has since dropped to $0.30 as of this writing, making the quantity of crypto stolen now price roughly $30,000.