Ex NRL star Trent Merrin has avoided conviction after pleading guilty to charges relating to a $140,000 crypto currency theft from a former teammate after submissions from Paul McGirr.
The premiership winning former Dragons forward was sentenced to an 18-month conditional release order without conviction by Magistrate Mark Douglass in Port Kembla Local Court on Wednesday 17 December.
The court heard the 36-year-old former Blues and international star siphoned the funds from the Bitcoin account of his former teammate Kaide Ellis.
Paul McGirr said Mr Merrin had repaid the money to Eillis.
“My client made the decision to plead guilty to avoid dragging his former teammate through an ugly court hearing,” Mr McGirr said.
“He also repaid Mr Ellis more than he owed in a gesture of good faith.
“The matter stemmed from a misunderstanding as to who owned the cryptocurrency and could have been settled without police involvement,” he said.
Detectives arrested Merrin at his South Coast home last month and charged him with dishonestly obtaining a financial advantage by deception.
The court heard Merrin showed Ellis how to create a crypto currency account using the Australian trading platform, CoinSpot, in July or August 2020 when the pair played for the Dragons.
By October 2021, Ellis’ initial investment of about $20,000 had ballooned to $90,000 thanks to the Bitcoin boom.
In 2022, Ellis bought a crypto ledger on Merrin’s advice to protect himself from online hackers and bitcoin theft, court documents said. In January 2023, Merrin helped set up the account before Ellis left a copy of his password at his ex-teammate’s home as a backup. On November 14, 2024, Ellis logged into his account and found that it had been drained from $140,000 to nothing, the documents said.
The next day, he reported the discovery to detectives from Dubbo Police who traced the funds to a Crypto wallet owned by Merrin.
Mr McGirr told the court Merrin disputed the amount owed and refused to repay Ellis in cash before he reported the matter to police.
Mr McGirr argued that the impact on Mr Merrin’s profile was already a punishment.
“He’s heavily involved in the community and there is still a deterrence in having [a bond] hanging over his head,” he said. "
“In this very isolated matter, it wouldn’t be walking off willy-nilly. I’m confident we are never going to see him [before the court] again.”
Speaking outside court to the media, Mr McGirr said “the court got it right, They saw it for what it was - a civil matter and he’d paid back more than he’d used. He wants to get on with his life, and he walks another day with a clean record and a person of good character as was found by some of those referees and the court.”