On September 2, a man who had stolen more than $15,000 of cryptocurrency from a mobile telephone was discovered by police in the U.S. state of Connecticut. This happened after the thief mistakenly emailed an apology to the detective investigating the case.

In April of this year, Darren Carter, who is a resident of the state of New Jersey, stole the phone of a man in Connecticut prior to transferring to himself the digital currency he found on the device from the victim's Coinbase account.

After transferring the money to his own account, Carter then exchanged the currency for U.S. dollars, which he subsequently deposited into his PayPal account.

The case then took a few interesting turns from there. First, Carter tried to apologize to his victim by sending him an email. But he instead sent the message to the man investigating the case. This led the detective to close in on Carter, which led to the second interesting turn in the case: Carter was already in prison, in New Jersey's Salem County Jail for completely unrelated charges.

The story, though has a happy ending: the police were able to recover all the stolen money, and they returned it to the victim.

Cryptocurrency theft has been in the news of late. Last month, an Australian citizen named Katherine Nguyen admitted to stealing about $450,000 worth of Ripple in January of the year before. She did so by hacking into the email account of someone who had the same last name.

In July, a former Microsoft employee was arrested after he illegally transferred nearly $3 million worth of digital currency into his own accounts. It was reported at the time that he was attempting to steal $10 million in total.

According to a company called CipherTrace, criminals so far in 2019 have stolen more than $4 billion from cryptocurrency users, investors and currency exchanges. Nearly $500 million has been stolen from cryptocurrency exchanges this year, with close to $125 million stolen in the first quarter of 2019 alone.