Living high above Sydney’s CBD in a luxury apartment, life was sweet for Amiel Rondan. The 36-year-old boasted an impressive collection of watches and jewellery including a Patek Phillipe number valued at $395,000, two Rolexes with a combined value of $100,000, several “replica” Cartier bracelets – worth north of $10,000 each – and a necklace with lab-grown diamonds worth $39,000. Amiel Rondan will return to court next month.
Credit: The Sydney Morning Herald Rondan’s good fortune allegedly extended beyond the $1 million worth of luxury accessories to cryptocurrency. Inside his Bathurst Street unit was a pink Samsung Galaxy phone that had allegedly received more than $440,000 worth of cryptocurrency in a three-week period. That same device had a seed phrase – essentially a pin code to rebuild a cryptocurrency wallet – for a Monero account that received more than $400,000 in September 2022.
Detectives also located 14.6 bitcoin worth approximately $1 million at the time using a seed phrase handwritten on a water bill and thousands of dollars in Australian and American cash. Despite his considerable riches, investigators monitoring surveillance devices in the Bathurst Street unit late last year noticed something odd – he didn’t seem to have a job.
Luxury watches seized from Amiel Rondan by NSW Police. Credit: NSW Police Police say that Rondan’s riches were instead a result of selling drugs on the dark web. Documents obtained by the Herald claim that Rondan .
