Jonathan Spalletta, a cybersecurity consultant, was convicted Wednesday of stealing nearly $55 million in cryptocurrency from a decentralized exchange and laundering the proceeds through a series of transactions before spending portions of the funds on rare collectibles, according to Bloomberg .
A New York jury reached the verdict after roughly two hours of deliberation. The money-laundering count alone carries a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison for Spalletta. U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff set sentencing for Feb. 16, according to Bloomberg.
Prosecutors charged Spalletta with carrying out two separate attacks in April 2021 against Uranium Finance, a cryptocurrency exchange that allowed users to deposit and swap cryptocurrencies through liquidity pools, according to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York. The first hack, on April 8, 2021, extracted approximately $1.4 million by exploiting a smart contract's rewards mechanism. The second, on April 28, 2021, targeted 26 separate liquidity pools and netted approximately $53.3 million, forcing Uranium Finance to shut down.
After laundering the funds using the cryptocurrency mixer Tornado Cash, Spalletta spent portions of the money on an array of collectibles, the Justice Department said. Investigators recovered a collection of rare Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering cards from his Maryland that prosecutors valued at more than $3 million, according to Bloomberg. Specific purchases included a "Black Lotus" Magic: The Gathering card for approximately $500,000, 18 packs of sealed "Alpha Booster" Magic cards for approximately $1.5 million, a sealed box of first-edition Pokémon booster packs for approximately $257,500, and a complete first-edition base set of Pokémon cards for approximately $750,000, the Justice Department said.
His purchases also included a Julius Caesar assassination-era Roman coin for roughly $601,545 and a swatch of fabric from the Wright brothers' original aircraft—later flown to the moon by Neil Armstrong—for roughly $137,500, the Justice Department said. Law enforcement separately seized approximately $31 million in cryptocurrency from Spalletta in February 2025, the Justice Department said.
Defense lawyers maintained that Spalletta's actions did not constitute hacking, telling jurors he relied on publicly accessible functions within Uranium Finance's smart contracts and never employed spoofed credentials or malicious code, according to Bloomberg.
After the first hack, Spalletta told another individual in writing, "I did a crypto heist of $1.5MM a couple of weeks ago . . . Crypto is all fake internet money anyway," the Justice Department said.
The case is U.S. v. Spalletta, 26-cr-118, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
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