A man says he was tortured for weeks in a New York townhouse. Another in Paris was held for ransom and his finger cut off. A couple in Connecticut were carjacked, beaten and thrown into a van.
All, authorities allege, were victims tied to cryptocurrency-related crimes that have spilled out from behind computer screens and into the real world as the largely unregulated currency surges in value.
While crypto thefts are not new, the use of physical violence is a far more recent trend, said John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas in Austin who tracks financial crimes.
“I think this kind of physical violence is a natural manifestation of the emboldened nature of crypto activities,” he said. “Things that might clearly be outside of social norms in other spaces — like robbing a bank — are somehow just part of the game here.”
Kidnapping, burglary and torture allegations
In the New York case, two American crypto investors — John Woeltz and William Duplessie — have been arrested on kidnapping and assault charges in recent days after a 28-year-old Italian man told police they tortured him for weeks to get his Bitcoin password. Attorneys for both men declined to comment.
While the allegations are still emerging, they come just weeks after 13 people were indicted on federal charges in Washington, D.C., accused of combining computer hacking and money laundering with old-fashioned impersonation and burglary to steal more than $260 million from victims’ cryptocurrency accounts.
Some are accused of hacking websites and servers to steal cryptocurrency databases and identify targets, but others are alleged to have broken into victims’ homes to steal their “hardware wallets” — devices that provide access to their crypto accounts.
The case stemmed from an investigation that started after a couple in Connecticut last year were forced out of a Lamborghini SUV, assaulted and bound in the back of a van. Authorities allege the incident was a ransom plot targeting the couple’s son — who they say helped steal more than $240 million worth of Bitcoin from a single victim. The son has not been charged, but is being detained on an unspecified “federal misdemeanor offense” charge, according to online jail records. Police stopped the carjacking and arrested six men.
