Man Who Spent Millions on Rare Pokémon and Magic Cards Found Guilty of Stealing Over $50 Million in Crypto
Jonathan Spalletta, a Maryland cybersecurity consultant, was convicted of computer fraud and money laundering for stealing over $50 million from the defunct crypto platform Uranium Finance. He exploited smart contract vulnerabilities to drain funds, which he subsequently laundered and spent on rare trading cards and historical artifacts. The theft caused the collapse of Uranium Finance, and Spalletta now faces a maximum combined prison sentence of 30 years.
- ▪Spalletta exploited code vulnerabilities in Uranium Finance to steal approximately $53.3 million in cryptocurrency in April 2021.
- ▪He used the stolen funds to purchase rare Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering cards, as well as an ancient Roman coin and a piece of fabric from the Wright brothers' airplane.
- ▪The U.S. Department of Justice seized cryptocurrency worth roughly $31 million from Spalletta in February 2025.
- ▪Spalletta was convicted of one count of computer fraud and one count of money laundering, with sentencing scheduled for next year.
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| Original publisher | Gizmodo |
| Canonical URL | https://gizmodo.com/man-who-spent-millions-on-rare-pokemon-and-magic-cards-found-guilty-of-stealing-over-50-million-in-crypto-2000823238 |
| Publication time | Wed, 07 Oct 2026 21:38:56 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-07T21:42:29.758Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-07T21:42:29.758Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | dZQUCNaqGowp · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A 36-year-old cybersecurity consultant and apparent trading card collector from Maryland was just convicted of computer fraud and money laundering in a case involving more than $50 million in stolen cryptocurrency. The U.S. Department of Justice announced Wednesday that Jonathan Spalletta was convicted of exploiting vulnerabilities in the code of the now-defunct crypto platform Uranium Finance, an exchange that allowed users to trade cryptocurrencies through liquidity…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Gizmodo.
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