Thief who stole $3.5 billion but lost all in one phone call

This is the story of a theft that kept one of the world’s top investigation agencies restless for six years. Not one or two, but the theft was worth 29,000 crore rupees (about $3.5 billion). How did a single phone call bring the thief down? How did he hide such a huge amount inside a small Cheetos container? And most surprising of all—after the money was recovered, why did the real owners refuse to claim it?

On September 13, 2019, a young man named Jimmy Zhong called 911. This call would soon become the biggest mistake of his life. Jimmy lived in a small town called Athens in the U.S. state of Georgia. He called the police to report a burglary at his house. When the officer asked what had been stolen, Jimmy said $400,000 was missing. Hearing such a large amount surprised the officer.

Jimmy had installed a strong security system in his house and even had CCTV footage showing a masked person entering the home. Jimmy was a graduate of the University of Georgia and was known among his friends as a party lover. He would spend up to $500,000 at a single party. Whenever he went to a bar, he would buy drinks for everyone there. Most of his friends stayed with him only because of his money and lifestyle. Once, to watch his favorite football team play, he gathered his friends and took them to Los Angeles on a private jet.

In short, Jimmy had an unbelievable amount of money at a very young age—more than he could even manage. When the police failed to find the thief, Jimmy hired a private detective named Martinelli. Because of Jimmy’s lifestyle and friend circle, the detective suspected that the theft might have been committed by someone close to him.

To investigate further, Martinelli started reviewing Jimmy’s social media accounts and bank transactions. Even the detective was puzzled—how could someone so young spend so much money? Jimmy always told people that he was a Bitcoin trader and crypto investor. Since Bitcoin prices had increased dramatically in recent years, people easily believed his story.

In the CCTV footage, the burglar seemed to know exactly when Jimmy was not home and when to enter the house. This suggested that the thief was probably someone close to Jimmy. However, this was not the first time Jimmy had been connected with the police. A few years earlier he had been arrested in a cocaine possession case, although he behaved politely with the police afterwards. In fact, Athens police sometimes even used the CCTV cameras outside his house to help investigate other cases.

But after the 911 call, Jimmy started attracting serious attention. Soon the Regional Cyber Crime Unit also learned that $400,000 had been stolen from Jimmy’s house and that he claimed to be a Bitcoin trader. They became suspicious about where all this money actually came from.

At the time, investigators had been working for years on a mysterious case connected to Silk Road, an online marketplace on the dark web where illegal items like drugs and weapons were traded using Bitcoin. In 2012, the website was hacked and someone stole 51,680 Bitcoins from different traders. Because the website itself was illegal, no one officially reported the theft.

The following year, the owner of Silk Road was arrested and the FBI shut down the website, seizing about 170,000 Bitcoins. However, 51,680 Bitcoins were still missing, and investigators had been trying to trace them for years.