Cryptocurrency has all the time made a ripe goal for theft—and never simply hacking, however the old school, up-close-and-personal type, too. Given that it may be irreversibly transferred in seconds with little greater than a password, it is maybe no shock that thieves have often sought to steal crypto in home-invasion burglaries and even kidnappings. But hardly ever do these thieves go away a path of violence of their wake as disturbing as that of 1 current, ruthless, and notably prolific gang of crypto extortionists.
The United States Justice Department earlier this week introduced the conviction of Remy Ra St. Felix, a 24-year-old Florida man who led a group of males behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims at hand over entry to their cryptocurrency financial savings. That announcement and the felony criticism laying out expenses in opposition to St. Felix centered largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an aged North Carolina couple, whose home St. Felix and considered one of his accomplices broke into earlier than bodily assaulting the 2 victims—each of their seventies—and forcing them to switch greater than $150,000 in bitcoin and ether to the thieves’ crypto wallets.
In truth, that six-figure sum seems to have been the gang’s solely confirmed haul from its bodily crypto thefts—though the burglars and their associates made tens of millions in whole, largely via extra conventional crypto hacking in addition to stealing different property. A deeper look into courtroom paperwork from the St. Felix case, nonetheless, reveals that the comparatively small revenue St. Felix’s gang made out of its burglaries doesn’t seize the total scope of the hurt they inflicted: In whole, these courtroom filings and DOJ officers describe how greater than a dozen convicted and alleged members of the crypto-focused gang broke into the houses of 11 victims, finishing up a brutal spree of armed robberies, loss of life threats, beatings, torture classes, and even one kidnapping in a marketing campaign that spanned 4 US states.
In courtroom paperwork, prosecutors say the boys—working in pairs or small groups—threatened to chop toes or genitalia off of 1 sufferer, kidnapped and mentioned killing one other, and deliberate to threaten one other sufferer’s little one as leverage. Prosecutors additionally describe disturbing torture techniques: how the boys inserted sharp objects beneath one sufferer’s fingernails and burned one other with a scorching iron, all in an effort to coerce their targets at hand over the gadgets and passwords essential to switch their crypto holdings.
“The victims in this case suffered a horrible, painful experience that no citizen should have to endure,” Sandra Hairston, a US lawyer for the Middle District of North Carolina who prosecuted St. Felix’s case, wrote within the Justice Department’s announcement of St. Felix’s conviction. “The defendant and his coconspirators acted purely out of greed and callously terrorized these they focused.”
The serial extortion spree is nearly definitely the worst of its type ever to be prosecuted within the US, says Jameson Lopp, the cofounder and chief safety officer of Casa, a cryptocurrency-focused bodily safety agency, who has tracked bodily assaults designed to steal cryptocurrency going again so far as 2014. “As far as I’m aware, this is the first case where it was confirmed that the same group of people went around and basically carried out home invasions on a variety of different victims,” Lopp says.
Lopp notes, nonetheless, that this sort of crime spree is greater than a one-off. He has discovered of different comparable makes an attempt at bodily theft of cryptocurrency in simply the previous month which have escaped public reporting—he says the victims in these instances requested him to not share particulars—and means that in-person crypto extortion could also be on the rise as thieves notice the attraction of crypto as a extremely priceless and immediately transportable goal for theft. “Crypto, as this highly liquid bearer asset, completely changes the incentives of doing something like a home invasion,” Lopp says, “or even kidnapping and extortion and ransom.”