A 22-year-old from Newport Beach, California, is heading to federal prison for laundering millions from a $263 million cryptocurrency heist. His crew didn’t even try to hide it.
Lifestyle built on stolen crypto
A Washington D.C. federal court sentenced Evan Tangeman, known online as “E,” “Tate,” and “Evan|Exchanger,” to 70 months on April 24. He’d pleaded guilty in December 2025 to a RICO conspiracy. Tangeman admitted laundering at least $3.5 million for a multi-state crime ring that had stolen more than $263 million in cryptocurrency.
The money moved fast and loudly. Nightclub bills hit $500,000 in a single evening. Luxury watches, designer handbags handed out at parties, private jets, a personal security detail, mansions around the U.S. running $40,000 to $80,000 a month, and cars from $100,000 to $3.8 million.
How the crypto money laundering scheme worked
The operation ran from at least October 2023 through May 2025. It started as a gaming friend group and spread across California, Connecticut, New York, Florida, and abroad. The ring used social engineering to strip victims of their crypto holdings, backed by database hackers, callers, and residential burglars who broke into homes to steal hardware wallets.
Tangeman’s job was to clean the money. He converted stolen crypto to cash and worked with real estate agents to secure Los Angeles mansions for members who had no income to explain. Most were unemployed and under 20. An unemployed 20-year-old paying $80,000 a month in rent draws attention. Still, his job was to prevent that. He later arranged the same setup in Miami when the group moved there in late 2024.
When co-defendants Lam and Jeandiel Serrano were arrested and the scale of the fraud became public, Tangeman told co-defendant Tucker Desmond to destroy the group’s digital devices. The court took that into account.
Was it worth it?
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro called it “greed so brazen it borders on the cartoonish.” and its hard to argue against it. The question that keeps circling in my mind is if you’re smart enough to steal $263 million, launder it across three cities, and keep a multi-state operation running for over a year why can’t you resist the $500,000 nightclub tab?
These cases end the same way. The technical execution is often impressive. The spending, however, is what brings them down. That kind of money, spent that visibly, doesn’t stay quiet. It leaves witnesses, receipts, informants, and eventually an arrest. The FBI and DOJ have been targeting cryptocurrency crime rings hard, and the louder the lifestyle, the simpler the case.
Seventy months in federal prison and a RICO conviction at 22 all for a Lamborghini and a ludicrous nightclub tab.
