GothFerrari sentenced to 78 months in $250M crypto heist

Marlon “GothFerrari” Ferro, 20, of Santa Ana, California, was sentenced to 78 months in federal prison after pleading guilty to conspiracy to participate in a racketeer influenced and corrupt organization. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly also ordered $2.5 million in restitution and three years of supervised release.

Ferro was arrested on May 13, 2025. Authorities recovered two firearms and a fake identification document at the time of his arrest.

Federal prosecutors wrote the criminal enterprise operated from late 2023 through early 2025 and stole well over $250 million in cryptocurrency. The group used social-engineering schemes to trick victims into revealing access to their digital assets and, when those methods failed, resorted to in-person burglaries to seize hardware wallets.

Prosecutors described Ferro as the operation’s “instrument of last resort,” breaking into homes to take hardware wallets. In February 2024, Ferro traveled to Winnsboro, Texas, and took a hardware wallet that contained about 100 bitcoin, worth more than $5 million at the time. Five months later in New Mexico, he conducted surveillance on a residence and smashed a window with a brick while searching for hardware wallets.

Court filings say Ferro also handled laundering of stolen funds. He used fraudulent identification to open a digital payment card on a geo-blocked platform that allowed members of the enterprise to convert and spend stolen cryptocurrency. The filings state Ferro spent more than $255,000 on designer clothing for co-conspirators, including Hermès Birkin bags for the girlfriend of the group’s leader.

After the leader’s arrest and sentencing in September 2024, filings indicate Ferro continued to assist from the outside, laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars and using proceeds to pay for the leader’s legal fees.

In the sentencing announcement, U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro wrote: “When his co-conspirators couldn’t deceive victims into handing over access to their cryptocurrency or hack their way into digital accounts, they turned to Ferro to break into homes and steal hardware wallets outright.” Pirro added that the scheme “blended sophisticated online fraud with old-fashioned burglary to drain victims of millions of dollars in digital assets,” and that Ferro’s sentence “sends a clear message: cryptocurrency fraud is not a victimless, consequence-free crime carried out safely behind a screen-it is serious criminal conduct that will lead to federal prison.”

Prosecutors said Ferro’s conviction was part of a broader enforcement effort targeting the group’s combination of online deception, account takeover and physical theft used to convert digital assets into spendable funds.