Ray William Johnson: True Story Podcast
This 15-Year-Old Teen Stole $24 Million - The Ellis Pinsky story
21 Apr 2025
The Ellis Pinsky scandal centers on a high-profile cryptocurrency theft orchestrated by a teenager. In 2018, at just 15 years old, Pinsky, a high school student from Irvington, New York, masterminded a scheme to steal approximately $24 million in cryptocurrency from investor Michael Terpin.
Full Episode
So talking trash while playing Call of Duty sort of leads to this 15-year-old kid becoming a multimillionaire. Let me explain.
Now his name is Ellis and this starts when Ellis is 13 living in Irvington, New York and Ellis is a normal teenager. But one day around 2016 he's playing Call of Duty Ghosts online and he's trash talking the other kids like, I'm doing your mom or whatever they say. And one of the guys he's talking trash to comes back and says, yo, how's the weather in Irvington? Which is where Ellis lives.
And Ellis is like, oh shit, how does this guy suddenly know where I live? Turns out this troll just used a free program to figure out Ellis's IP address. It's not really all that complex. But from here on, Ellis becomes fascinated with this ability to track down people's information online.
So for the next few months, he studies this extensively and he starts learning hacking skills and he eventually joins an online hacking group. And over time, he learns a skill that's going to make him a bit of money. How to steal people's username handles on Twitter and Instagram, which probably sounds stupid, but there's actually money in this.
Because if you own the Instagram handle like at John, then every person named John is going to want to buy it from you. So he learns how to hack people's accounts and steal their handles and he sells them and he starts making a little money on the side. However, a few thousand dollars at a time is just not enough for Ellis. He wants more.
And through this hacker group, he learns a way to make millions called SIM swapping. And it works like this. Basically, you get someone working at a phone store like an AT&T store and you call them and you get them to link someone else's SIM card to your phone number. Once you do that, you have access to everything their phone is connected to. their email, sometimes their bank account.
And so Ellis, he starts combing through social media, looking for anyone who posts about working at a cell phone carrier store. Once he finds that person, he reaches out to them and he offers to pay them to connect someone else's SIM card to his phone number. And surprisingly, a ton of these cell phone carrier workers say, All right. And he does this scam for a while.
Then one day in 2018, Ellis is now 15 years old and someone from his hacker group reaches out to him and asks him specifically to hack this dude. His name's Turpin. And Turpin is an older rich guy and he's apparently nearly a billionaire. He has some kind of connection to Match.com or something.
So Ellis agrees to hack Turpin, and the next day he hits up one of his contacts who works at an AT&T phone store in Connecticut, and that contact ports Turpin's SIM card to a phone Ellis can access, and boom, he's in. So he and the other hacker, they start searching through all Turpin's stuff, and that is when they find an email account with a file that holds the keys to a bunch of crypto wallets.
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