Trial begins today in New York for the Peraire-Bueno brothers, who swiped $25 million from trading bots and are accused of conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering

A federal trial has opened in Manhattan for brothers Anton and James Peraire‑Bueno, two MIT-educated programmers accused of orchestrating a highly technical $25 million exploit on the Ethereum blockchain in April 2023. Prosecutors allege the pair spent months studying how automated “sandwich” trading bots operated, then executed a complex, multi-step transaction that diverted roughly $25 million in cryptocurrency from three traders into wallets they controlled in about 12 seconds. The brothers are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, with each count carrying a potential sentence of up to 20 years in prison. According to the indictment, the scheme involved manipulating the order of pending transactions in an Ethereum block, effectively hijacking trades that high-frequency bots were programmed to execute, and then routing the misappropriated funds through shell entities, private wallets, and foreign exchanges to conceal their origin. Prosecutors describe this as a “first-of-its-kind” attack that “exploited the very integrity of the Ethereum blockchain” using the brothers’ advanced math, computer science, and crypto trading expertise. The defense counters that the brothers simply outplayed predatory bots in an unregulated environment and that the alleged victims lost funds through pre-programmed trades without any direct interaction with the defendants. The case is being closely watched because it could set important precedent on how U.S. courts distinguish between unlawful fraud and aggressive, code-based tactics in decentralized finance, and how traditional wire-fraud and money-laundering statutes apply to sophisticated on-chain exploits.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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