Crypto Whale Who Made Millions on Leverage Trading Is a Convicted Fraudster: ZachXBT

A mysterious crypto trader that made millions trading derivatives this year has been identified as William Parker, a convicted fraudster, according to blockchain sleuth ZachXBT.

Parker made $6.8 million on one position after going long on BTC just before Donald Trump’s weekend announcement of a U.S. strategic crypto reserve, per ZachXBT. He then turned around and made another $9 million going short BTC as the price pump quickly reversed.

All of his positions used 50x leverage – a high risk strategy as it means the liquidation price of a position is close to the entry point.

And it seems as though high risk gambling was this particular trader’s speciality, as on-chain data suggests the wallet frequently interacted with Roobet, Gamdom, Shuffle, BC Game, & Metawin accounts – all crypto-based online casinos.

It turns out that the wallet connected to the trades was set as the drainer fee receiver on a phishing website in January, receiving $17.1K from a phishing draining customer in the same month, ZachXBT revealed.

The investigation then dives into a Solana wallet that was the first to interact with the trader’s wallet. This SOL wallet made withdrawals from four casinos following an input validation exploit on a casino game. ZachXBT reached out to these casinos which provided him with a Telegram account of the user.

That Telegram account yielded verification that the trader was active on-chain at the same time as posting in derivatives trading chats on Telegram.

ZachXBT went one step further — finding a payment sent by the trader to an unnamed person on the HyperLiquid exchange. That transaction led to the uncovering of a phone number linked to a person called William Parker.

Parker last year was convicted and sentenced to 2 1/2 years in jail in Finland for stealing $1 million from two casinos in 2023 . He was served time in 2010 in the U.K. for multiple fraud charges related to hacking and gambling.