Ajay Shinjin, a 25-year-old Londoner also known as AJ Marley Cruz, has been jailed for two and a half years for helping a gang steal almost £200,000 ($264,200) in cryptocurrency from four BT customers.

The sentence was handed down on Thursday at Inner London Crown Court, as recorded in a City of London Police announcement. The case was reported by COINOTAG on October 9, 2026. The two-and-a-half-year term underlines that helping to run or support a SIM-swap operation can itself carry a substantial custodial penalty in the UK courts.

The theft belongs to a class of attacks known as SIM swapping, sometimes called SIM hijacking or port-out fraud. In such attacks, criminals transfer a victim's mobile phone number to a SIM card under their own control, typically by exploiting a mobile operator's account-recovery procedures or by persuading or bribing carrier staff to reassign the number.

Once an attacker controls the number, they receive the victim's calls and text messages, including the one-time passcodes that banks, email providers, and cryptocurrency platforms commonly deliver by SMS. Because all of those services send their codes to the same phone, a single hijacked number can put several of a victim's accounts within an attacker's reach at once. Law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies in several countries, including the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), have repeatedly warned that SIM swaps can be used to bypass SMS-based two-factor authentication and drain victims' exchange and wallet accounts. That risk is also why such agencies generally advise protecting important accounts with app-based authenticators or other methods that do not depend on a phone number, where a service offers them.

Cryptocurrency holdings are a frequent target of such attacks because transactions are generally irreversible. Once a transfer has gone through, victims typically cannot turn to a bank or card issuer to reverse it, which is why accountability in cases of this kind comes through criminal investigation and prosecution. Bitcoin (BTC), the cryptocurrency named in this case, is the largest digital asset by market capitalization.

The City of London Police, which announced the sentencing, serves as the United Kingdom's national lead force for fraud and operates Action Fraud, the country's national reporting service for fraud and cyber crime. BT, whose customers were targeted in the case, is one of the United Kingdom's largest telecommunications providers.

This report was first published by COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/ajay-shinjin-jailed-200000-bitcoin-sim-swap-theft