Criminals view flashy crypto holders as easy targets, resulting in a disturbing series of violent robberies. The criminals told Rocelo Lopes that they had taken his wife hostage and demanded that he pay the ransom in Bitcoin. For details, continue reading Kriptokoin.com.
Bitcoin and crypto rich become new target for criminals
Rocelo Lopes, then 46-year-old crypto entrepreneur, received a ransom phone demanding payment in Bitcoin early one evening in April 2017 . “This is just another scammer. This is someone trying to make fun of me,” she thought and hung up. Still, she checked on her family’s maid. The maid said that her 32-year-old wife took her daughter to school from the family home a few hours ago, but never came home. It was later confirmed that his wife had been kidnapped for ransom.
The Bitcoin-led cryptocurrency boom has created a new class of rich and semi-celebrities. Investors and technicians who made early bets on crypto are now hailed as revolutionary financial prophets and gilded by the lure of sudden wealth. In the process, some became prime targets of opportunistic criminals. Security experts, investors, and others in the space say insufficient attention has been paid, from simple robberies to home invasions, kidnappings, torture, and physical crimes targeting crypto holders.
These types of attacks demonstrate a fundamental weak link in Blockchain-based digital currencies that claim new high levels of financial security and privacy. For all the complex cryptographic math that underpins the integrity of cryptocurrencies, there’s not much you can do about it if someone with a gun forces you to give up your own.
Jameson Lopp, a privacy-focused technologist and Bitcoin advocate, has made it a habit to monitor physical security threats to cryptocurrency users. It tracks physical attacks targeting crypto holders, from swatting attempts to kidnappings and more. It has identified nearly 100 incidents that have been publicly reported in the media over the past few years, and it believes this number is likely a severe undercount as a result of victims’ unwillingness to draw the attention of criminals further.
Jameson Lopp’s list is a comprehensive introduction to the different forms of violence around the world. A man drugged on a Tinder date to persuade her to give him his passwords. A 14-year-old schoolboy in northern England who was beaten and held for ransom after bragging about his crypto trading earnings on social media. A digital trader in the Netherlands was targeted by attackers in 2019 posing as police officers who broke into his home and tortured him with an electric drill in front of his 4-year-old daughter to force her to surrender her crypto assets.
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