A Former Party Producer Has Been Charged With A $2.7M ‘Cash-To-Bitcoin’ Scheme.

A former party producer from New York was accused on Friday with running a cryptocurrency money laundering scheme that he advertised on social media, boasting to customers that he could help them stay “totally off the radar.”

The Manhattan District Attorney charged the man, a former party producer, with laundering $2.7 million in bitcoin and cash to aid numerous customers in concealing money obtained via allegedly criminal activities.

The cash-to-bitcoin operation is described by the MDA as a “takedown” of a global bitcoin money laundering organization.

Thomas Spieker, 42, and his friends, according to the MDA, used bitcoin to facilitate a number of illegal operations, including dark-web drug trades.

Dark net drug traffickers selling ketamine, fake Xanax, and other illicit narcotics in every state in America, a hacker, and a member of an Eastern European organized criminal group were among Spieker’s clients, according to authorities.

Spieker changed approximately $2.5 million in Bitcoin and over $380,000 in cryptocurrencies into US dollars between January 2018 and August 2021, according to the MDA, using “a rotating set of accomplices” who registered bank and crypto exchange accounts to enable the laundering of “criminal proceeds.”

Spieker began doing Google searches for the phrase “bitcoin money laundering” in 2014 after receiving a complaint, and wrote a Facebook post offering his services to anybody who wanted to stay completely unnoticed while engaged in illegal activity.

Spieker was freed on his own recognizance after waiving his right to a jury trial. His lawyer, Richard Verchick, declined to comment. Six other offenders pleaded not guilty and were freed on their own recognizance after entering not guilty pleas.

Spieker, who formerly worked at Goldman Sachs in stock analysis, has been a Bitcoin supporter since the currency’s inception.

He was featured in a Vice story on his career as a DJ known as S!CK in 2014.

In a statement released Thursday, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg said the case “demonstrates how emerging technologies like bitcoin can become important drivers of a broad spectrum of criminal behavior that can quickly traverse the globe.”

Spieker is also accused of laundering $620,000 for a customer suspected of being a part of an organized criminal network in Eastern Europe and $267,000 for the operator of an international romance hoax.

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