Ex-LAPD officer gets life sentence for $350,000 Koreatown bitcoin robbery

A former Los Angeles police officer has been sentenced to life plus 15 years in state prison for posing as a cop and robbing a teenager of a hard drive holding roughly $350,000 in Bitcoin.

Despite the recent run of violent crypto activities, the sentence is one of the stiffest punishments that have been handed down so far.

Who bagged a life sentence for a crypto crime?

Eric Halem, 38, has been sentenced to concurrent life terms for kidnapping and robbery by the Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mildred Escobedo.

Halem was convicted by a jury in March after a two-week trial regarding a December 2024 robbery. Prosecutors said Halem and three other men presented themselves as officers serving a search warrant to talk their way into a Koreatown high-rise rented by a 17-year-old.

Once inside, the group threatened to kill the teenager unless he surrendered a hard drive storing about $350,000 in Bitcoin. The victim, sworn in under only his first name, Daniel, handed it over. The Times reported that during the investigation, it was discovered that Daniel had built his crypto holdings partly by scamming other people.

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