Bitcoin mining hardware exec falls for sophisticated crypto scam to tune of $200k
Joel Khalili – Nov 18, 2025 1:37 PM
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As Kent Halliburton stood in a bathroom at the Rosewood Hotel in central Amsterdam, thousands of miles from home, running his fingers through an envelope filled with 10,000 euros in crisp banknotes, he started to wonder what he had gotten himself into.
Halliburton is the cofounder and CEO of Sazmining, a company that operates bitcoin mining hardware on behalf of clients—a model known as “mining-as-a-service.” Halliburton is based in Peru, but Sazmining runs mining hardware out of third-party data centers across Norway, Paraguay, Ethiopia, and the United States.
As Halliburton tells it, he had flown to Amsterdam the previous day, August 5, to meet Even and Maxim, two representatives of a wealthy Monaco-based family. The family office had offered to purchase hundreds of bitcoin mining rigs from Sazmining—around $4 million worth—which the company would install at a facility currently under construction in Ethiopia. Before finalizing the deal, the family office had asked to meet Halliburton in person.
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Sorry, but NO ONE gets cash filled envelopes in an honest transaction.
That should have been the first clue to a scam.
Then to “prove a capability or a holding” of bitcoin transfer some to a strange wallet?
Just reading the story, my ex-CISO “spydee senses” were on high alert.
And inputing a key “seed phrase” into an unknown software wallet you just downloaded was just the height of stupidity.
Sorry to pile on and beat a “dead horse”, but the warning signs were there.
Who knew if “wealthy Monaco-based family office” was even a real entity. Or if they even knew what was going on in their name.
Argh!
“You can’t cheat an honest man.” — W. C. Fields
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