Nine cops have been arrested final week within the Indian state of Gujurat for kidnapping a person and extorting 200 bitcoins from him.
The crime passed off in February, in accordance with a report in Quartz India.
The sufferer, a businessman, mentioned that he was taken to a secret location and compelled to switch the bitcoins to a different pockets. 200 bitcoins are equal to roughly $1.6 million at right this moment’s worth.
The checklist of situations of cryptocurrency-related violent crime is sadly getting longer.
In one instance, a gang of 5 in Istanbul disguised themselves as policemen and flagged a businessman’s automobile. They then took his banking passwords at gunpoint. 450 bitcoins have been taken, at that time price about $2.83 million.
According to an area information report, police tracked the gang members down – one fled jail, and one other proposed to his girlfriend in an “extravagant ceremony at a luxurious restaurant”. Prior to that crime, the gang had stolen mining units from three totally different folks.
All worthwhile belongings are magnets for thieves, and Bitcoin is not any totally different. It even has a bonus for the perpetrator as a result of as a stolen good it's troublesome to trace – though not inconceivable.
We printed a abstract of Bitcoin-related violence in February. One sufferer was a younger Russian on vacation in Thailand who was pressured to switch a considerable amount of Bitcoin to a bunch of males who broke into his condo.
According to the New York Times, native police truly requested the sufferer for recommendation as to the best way to catch the criminals – Chanut Hongsitthichaikul, who investigated the case, mentioned: “We asked the victim how to track it since they know Bitcoin better than us. We asked them how to check the receiver. They said there is no way. It is hard to do.”
At a convention referred to as the Satoshi Roundtable held in Cancun in February, a while was devoted to this topic.
The convention itself was protected by a employed safety pressure. One of the proposals was a ‘duress wallet’ with a restricted inventory of forex that may be handed to criminals in case of a bodily assault.
One attendee on the convention was Jameson Lopp, an infrastructure engineer and hodler who had a SWAT crew falsely referred to as to his home final yr. Writing in regards to the convention in Medium, he relayed that a lot of the dialogue revolved round holding funds in chilly wallets as an efficient manner of stopping hacks.
The development of bodily crypto asset robberies will speed up if attackers have a good success price. Securing your belongings not solely helps you, it helps us all by deterring bodily attackers from even making an attempt.
— Jameson Lopp (
@lopp) February eight, 2018
In phrases of bodily violence, widespread sense guidelines: don’t promote how wealthy you might be. And when you should, just remember to have turned off geo-tracking in your digital units, safe your house, and if all else fails:
thoughts if I show my setup, too? Yea I’m a cowboy. pic.twitter.com/VCxF8RH0v7
— ▲M013▲ (@Marker013) December 16, 2017
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