He was given a sentence of one year and one day and ordered to forfeit $500,000 and a Mercedes-Benz, with restitution to be set later.
Prosecutors say Parks posed as companies like “MultiMillionaire LLC” and “CP3O LLC” to convince cloud providers to hand over larger compute allotments.
Between January and August 2021, the stolen capacity was used to mine nearly $1million worth of Ether, Litecoin, and Monero.
The DOJ also said Parks laundered proceeds through exchanges, an NFT marketplace, payment processors and banks, and that some of the money paid for a Mercedes-Benz, jewelry and first-class travel.
Today the US Attorney’s Office, Eastern Dist. of NY unsealed an indictment charging Charles O. Parks III a.k.a. “CP3O”, with operating a large-scale illegal cryptojacking op
The defendant pleaded guilty to wire fraud in December, avoiding longer charges that could have carried far stiffer sentences.
An April 2024 indictment named accounts tied to a subsidiary of a Seattle-based cloud and electronics firm and a Redmond-based computing company as among those defrauded.
Authorities described the total value of computing resources taken in the scheme as more than $3.5 million.
Wallet breaches accounted for nearly $2 billion across 34 incidents, while phishing attacks totaled over $400 million across 132 events, according to those industry figures.
$2.47B lost in the first half of the year. $801M lost in Q2 alone. Phishing and wallet compromise dominated the threat landscape.
Cloud services rent huge amounts of CPU and GPU time, and attackers who gain elevated access can run mining rigs at scale while bills pile up in the providers’ ledgers.
In this case, the miners converted compute into cryptocurrency that prosecutors say funded a luxury lifestyle. The DOJ framed the case as a clear example of how tech access and lax vetting can be abused for profit.
The sentencing included forfeiture of $500,000 and the car; final restitution numbers will be decided later.
Officials, including New York City Police Department commissioner Jessica S. Tisch, stressed that the case shows the real-world impact of tech fraud and illegal mining.
Featured image from The Boar, chart from TradingView
