How a Journalist Went From Exposing Mexican Cartels to Losing His Crypto Life Savings

Olivier Acuña had to keep his wits about him to survive as a reporter. Then he worked in crypto and got scammed out of $400,000.

Updated Dec 20, 2024, 3:22 p.m. UTC Published Dec 20, 2024, 3:20 p.m. UTC

On a balmy evening in 2023 on the east coast of Spain, Olivier Acuña sat at his computer to transfer his life savings to another cryptocurrency wallet, as he had done hundreds of times before.

“Sending crypto always induces anxiety,” Acuña told CoinDesk. This rang painfully true that night.

As soon as Acuña hit send, it was over: $400,000 worth of crypto — all his money — was gone, pilfered by an anonymous phishing scammer. A piercing noise rang in Acuña’s ears, his temperature rose and his fists clenched.

Acuña’s loss demonstrates that no one is immune to crypto hacks. He's a seven-year crypto industry veteran, someone who grasps the need for wariness given the dangers that lurk around blockchains. Before that, he was a journalist for decades, where staying alert was a must as he faced violent drug cartels in Mexico and torture in prison.

And yet he became one of the many victims of crypto scams. In 2023, U.S. officials received 69,000 reports of crypto theft totaling more than $5.6 billion.

Getting that money back can be hard. If your normal bank account gets breached, insurance will almost certainly cover your losses. But there's no highly regulated system like that in crypto, which is famously and quite intentionally decentralized. While that disintermediation gives crypto users the freedom from institutions that they crave, it's also a double-edged sword. The omission of gatekeepers can also leave people a single button click away from ruin.

The hack itself was nothing special. Because Acuña couldn’t access his funds on a Ledger hardware device, he reached out to customer support via social media. An impersonator swooped in and, following 30 minutes of deception, Acuña was stuck in the scammer’s web.

“Phishing scams remain incredibly prolific today,” Adrian Hetman, head of triaging at Web3 security researcher Immunefi, told CoinDesk. “Phishing attempts are a growing concern in crypto, as criminals see it as an effective way to steal user funds at scale and apply social engineering for more sophisticated attacks on project infrastructure.”

Acuña was helpless again, this time at the mercy of a blockchain that was once his salvation following a horrendous ordeal of false imprisonment in Mexico.

Working undercover

Acuña began working as a journalist in the 1990s — a career that confronted him with government censorship, false imprisonment and death threats.

His work on organized crime, elections and corruption soon got him noticed by United Press International (UPI) and Reforma, where he began diving deeper into one of the most notorious and violent drug cartels in the world.

He was based in Sinaloa, a state in Mexico that runs down the west coast from Los Mochis to Mazatlán. The fertile, mountainous territory emerged as a hotbed of organized crime, leading to the formation of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán's infamous Sinaloa Cartel.

Sierra Tarahumara, Sinaloa, Mexico (Alejandro Cartagena/Unsplash)

Acuña’s coverage of the cartel eventually led to him working independently as a freelance journalist with his work being picked up by the likes of Associated Press and Reuters. This was when his career in Mexico reached a turbulent crescendo.

Authorities caught wind of one of Acuña’s stories on corruption and decided enough was enough. They accused him of hiding a weapon that belonged to the Attorney General’s office. Acuña says he was tortured for 16 hours.

“One day, I was thrown into a vehicle in the most violent manner you can imagine," he said. "They sent a police commander widely known for torturing people, and they abducted me. For 16 hours they waterboarded me, tied me up, cut off my circulation, folded me backwards. At one point, they told me, ‘Next door we have your family. We will bring them in here one by one and kill them in front of you until you tell us where the gun is.’”

Acuña was subsequently jailed for two years on accusations — which Acuña says were false — that were later dropped. He filed a human rights lawsuit against Mexican authorities.

Crypto salvation, or not

In 2017, Acuña wiped the slate clean of his tortuous past, entering the wonderfully weird world of crypto, enjoying stints as a public relations officer at payments firm Electroneum, a television producer at BloxLive and most recently another public relations role at DePIN company IOTEX.

His tough background prepared him for the crypto industry, which despite growing acceptance by the traditional finance sector, continues to grapple with the Wild West environment of its early days.

While Acuña might not have the most common backstory for those working in crypto, it remains a pertinent reminder that the allure of the crypto industry is not just speculative financial gain: It’s also an industry that checks the power of governments, banks and elites, which appealed to Acuña.

“The first day that I began writing about crypto and blockchain, I said, 'Here it is, the solution to all of the issues of the lack of freedom of expression. Here it is, the solution to government corruption. Here it is, finally something that I can have faith in and have and do passionately,'” Acuña told CoinDesk.

Despite losing his life savings, Acuña continues to work in the crypto industry — although he warns that it’s a long way away from going mainstream.

“If we ever want mass adoption, this needs to be seamless,” he said. At the moment, the user experience is “anxiety-inducing. Every time I send crypto now, I think, ‘Have I done it wrong? Am I going to lose my money?' Each and every time.’”

Unless “we get an application where all your crypto is in that same app, and it doesn't matter what freaking network it is, you can convert it into whatever you want, to convert it and send it, then I just don't see it” taking off.

This remains a key hurdle for the industry; tech-savvy millennials know how to buy an asset on Ethereum, bridge it to Solana and buy a memecoin on Pump.fun before sending that to an exchange, but the majority of regular people don’t.

“I don’t want to exit crypto, I’m still excited about crypto," Acuña said. "Will moving money around always be traumatic? Yes. But I love this sector.”

Oliver Knight

Oliver Knight is the co-leader of CoinDesk data tokens and data team. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022 Oliver spent three years as the chief reporter at Coin Rivet. He first started investing in bitcoin in 2013 and spent a period of his career working at a market making firm in the UK. He does not currently have any crypto holdings.

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