ALEXANDRIA, Va. – A Canadian was sentenced yesterday to a year in prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit aggravated identity theft.
According to court documents, in May 2022, Cameron Albert Redman, 22, of Mississauga, Ontario, formed a scheme to steal non-fungible tokens (NFTs) by gaining unauthorized access to the X accounts of various digital artists. The conspirators used the artists’ online identities to direct the artists’ followers to fraudulent websites. There, victims would seek to claim new NFTs from the digital artists. Though victims thought they were authorizing a transaction to receive NFTs into their digital wallets, they unknowingly enabled the conspirators to remove cryptocurrency and NFTs from their wallets.
Within a few days, Redman and his co-conspirators defrauded over 200 victims and profited over $794,000.
Erik S. Siebert, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, and Reid Davis, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI Washington Field Office’s Criminal Division, made the announcement after sentencing by U.S. District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema.
The Justice Department’s Office of International Affairs provided substantial assistance to secure the arrest and March 2025 extradition from Portugal of Redman. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police Cybercrime Investigation Team, Central Region, provided valuable assistance in this case.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Zoe Bedell prosecuted the case.
A copy of this press release is located on the website of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia. Related court documents and information are located on the website of the District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia or on PACER by searching for Case No. 1:25-cr-129.
Source: U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of Virginia
One year for more than 200 victims? The prosecution is likely angered by that, as they sought three years plus conditions. In their position on sentencing, filed July 22, they government began its statement thusly:
Cameron Redman is a serial online fraudster. After being incarcerated for a year for stealing $40 million in a SIM swapping attack, he almost immediately returned to online criminal activities. His next round of sophisticated fraud schemes—the crimes at issue here—resulted in financial losses totaling at least hundreds of thousands of dollars to approximately two hundred victims in a remarkably short period of time. He unsuccessfully sought to target even more victims, failing only due to technical difficulties. A Guidelines sentence of 35 months is necessary and appropriate to reflect the seriousness of the defendant’s crimes and deter him from future criminal conduct. Such a sentence will also give the defendant an important opportunity to disconnect from the harmful communities he has found on the internet and take advantage of the Bureau of Prison’s services for rehabilitation.
Redman’s defense responded by portraying Redman as a vulnerable kid who grew up on the internet. Their position statement began:
Cameron Albert Redman stands before this Court, a 22-year-old young man largely raised by the internet. From an early age, Cameron was burdened with instability, emotional abandonment, and mental health struggles that went largely unrecognized and untreated. Isolated and deeply anxious, he sought connection in the only place that seemed to offer it: online. The internet became his escape and, eventually, his community. The internet gave him an identity. It allowed him to form the friendships and relationships that his anxiety and depression wouldn’t allow him to establish in person. It also brought him the attention and admiration he starved for in real life. But while the internet brought Cameron comfort, it also allowed him to engage in virtually unmonitored and increasingly criminal conduct influenced by, and motivated by his intent to impress, his online peers. His conduct was both intentional and illegal. And it resulted in financial harm to real people—not just faceless usernames and account holders. But this Court should evaluate Cameron’s offense conduct, and his appropriate punishment, under the circumstances in which it occurred and through the eyes of a psychologically vulnerable teenager desperate to be seen, accepted, and valued.
That opening paragraph could probably be a template for all cases where a young person has been prosecuted for cybercrime. Should all teens and young adults get light sentences based on that kind of argument if accompanied by a few psychological reports to support it? If judges, with the best of intentions, perhaps, continue to let young people off lightly, where is the deterrent value to other young people?
DataBreaches notes that the judge who sentenced Redman is the same judge who initially sentenced “Pompompurin” (Conor Fitzpatrick) to time served and who will be re-sentencing Pompompurin after the appeals court held that she abused her discretion in giving him such a light sentence. Will Redman’s prosecutors appeal her sentence in this case? They haven’t indicated that they will, but the absence of any quotable statement following the sentence may signal their unhappiness.