Coinbase Impersonator Pleads Guilty to $16M Crypto Theft, Faces Prison

This case underscores how social engineering, not protocol failure, remains the dominant loss vector in crypto. The impersonation of a trusted exchange brand let one operator scale a single script across roughly 100 victims, which matters for how platforms and users think about identity verification and out-of-band confirmation. The open question is whether exchange-brand impersonation schemes keep producing outsized losses relative to on-chain exploits, and how liability gets assigned when the breach is human rather than technical.