A man living in Highland Park has been accused of helping pull off a giant heist seemingly ripped from the pages of a cyber-security pulp thriller: A $400 million hack of FTX.
Robert Powell’s sprawling rented house on Museum Drive in Highland Park, Feb. 20, 2024. Powell was arrested here last month and accused of a $400 million crypto hack. By the time the FBI raided Robert Powell’s luxurious Highland Park home three years ago, what agents saw as the red flags of fraud were everywhere.
As the Tribune first reported, Powell was arrested at his home on Museum Drive last month on a federal indictment filed in Washington, D.C., charged with participating in a sophisticated “SIM swap” scheme with two out-of-state associates that allegedly siphoned at least $400 million in virtual currency from a single company and millions more from other individual victims.
In fact, the 2021 affidavit indicated the feds were aware at the time that Powell was moving on from PayPal to more sophisticated SIM swap schemes, which use stolen identities to get cellphone carriers to switch over a number to a new device, allowing the hacker to loot a victim’s virtual accounts. The U.S. attorney’s office in South Bend had no comment on the status of its probe, and a spokesperson for federal prosecutors in Washington also declined to answer questions about the case filed there.The sprawling, $2 million, seven-bedroom home where Powell has lived for at least the past four years sits on a quiet, cul-de-sac lane just off of Half Day Road, a few doors away from Bulls legend Michael Jordan’s former estate.
“All hell was breaking loose,” said Tracy Marshbanks, who lives a few doors away. “I was just getting up, and I was like, is it fireworks? Gunshots?” “At the time they raided Mr. Powell’s home and arrested him, the government knew he was represented by counsel,” Pissetzky said. “All they had to do was make a phone call and I would gladly have arranged for him to surrender.”
They told investigators the leader of the fraud scheme was Powell, their friend from Elkhart who had figured out a way to exploit weaknesses in the online wallet PayPal to steal at least $1.3 million from unsuspecting victims beginning as far back as 2018, according to the affidavit. The two victims of the Utah robbery told authorities Powell had paid to fly them to California, where they met with other associates and, on Powell’s instructions, targeted numerous Walmarts in the Los Angeles area over the course of several days, the affidavit stated.
Powell replied “he would ‘never’ stop, even if he made enough money to afford to walk away,” the affidavit stated. State police later spotted the car heading south on Interstate 15, leading to a high-speed chase that ended about 40 miles away when the suspects bailed out of the car and fled on foot, local news reported at the time. One suspect was quickly arrested while the other was found later by police. A third suspect was labeled a fugitive.
The Indiana indictment alleged their gang, the “ChoppaBoyz,” operated out of Elkhart and was known for selling narcotics as well as legitimate merchandise such as T-shirts, ballistic vests, and other memorabilia. The “ChoppaBoyz” insignia featured a silhouette of a military-style rifle. “They knew traveling back to the Midwest with a substantial amounts of cash from the scheme, and so they traveled out to rob them,” the affidavit stated.When investigators started looking into Powell and his girlfriend’s backgrounds, they found no legitimate income to explain how two people in their early 20s could be living so extravagantly, including renting the $2 million home in Highland Park, the affidavit stated.
When officers interviewed Powell at the residence, Powell “claimed that he had placed the cash in the mailbox because it was his rental payment and that it was the typical way that he paid his landlord,” according to the affidavit. At the same time, the sensational meltdown of Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange was making headlines around the world. Customers were pulling funds off FTX en masse, leading to the Bahamas freezing the exchange’s assets on Nov. 10, 2022. The next day, Bankman-Fried had stepped down as CEO and his company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
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