Joseph Kim, a 24-year-old trader, had a promising carrier before him until he ended up being accused for stealing crypto assets worth $2 million according to Reuters. He was working for a new cryptocurrency unit of a well-known financial firm called Consolidated Trading LLC. The crypto division of Consolidated was created in the 3rd quarter of 2017 while Joseph Kim joined it in September.

His first unauthorized transfer was when he sent 980 LTC (worth $48.000) to a personal digital wallet short after he joined his new unit. He was caught and after being questioned about the transaction he tried to justify it by stating that the transaction was made due to security reasons, as he was having problems with Bitfinex, a well known cryptocurrency exchange. He even told his supervisor, that the coins were retransferred to a Consolidated owned wallet, which was a lie as well.

Of course, the stealing did not stop here. Joseph decided to send 55 BTC (worth $433.000) from a corporate account to an unknown address. His supervisor asked for an explanation once again and Kim decided to keep lying. He said that the transfer had been blocked and he was taking necessary steps to unblock it. To cover up his traces, he even sent back 27 bitcoins to the Consolidated account.

Eventually Kim decided that he must go for a jackpot and the games have been running long enough. He transferred 284 BTC (worth $2.8 million) to a personal wallet. Later he sent back 102 of those coins to the corporate account so it won’t raise suspicion, possessing 28 from previous and 182 BTC from the last transaction at the time. Kim decided that he needed to start day trading with the BTC either to send all the stolen BTC back and keep the profits or simply to make more out of his loot, who knows.

He was investing in short future positions with 55 BTC. The margin calls went wrong, hence he had to steal more to cover the losses. After the company realized finally what their employee did, they decided to raise charges through the police. Kim got arrested and he admitted to the charges. In the end Consolidated was able to recover 144 BTC, but still the overall losses exceeded $603.000 USD.

Kim stated that he only tried to fix what he has already done with the continuous stealing. Regardless, he is facing a possible jail time of 20 years.