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We have reached the “severed fingers and abductions” stage of the crypto revolution
From Nate Anderson over at Ars Technica [arstechnica.com]:
French gendarmes have been busy policing crypto crimes, but these aren't the usual financial schemes, cons, and HODL! shenanigans one usually reads about. No, these crimes involve abductions, (multiple) severed fingers, and (multiple) people rescued from the trunks of cars—once after being doused with gasoline.
This previous weekend was particularly nuts, with an older gentleman snatched from the streets of Paris' 14th arrondissement on May 1 by men in ski masks. The 14th is a pleasant place—I highly recommend a visit to the catacombs in Place Denfert-Rochereau—and not usually the site of snatch-and-grab operations. The abducted man was apparently the father of someone who had made a packet in crypto. The kidnappers demanded a multimillion-euro ransom from the man's son.
According to Le Monde, the abducted father was taken to a house in a Parisian suburb, where one of the father's fingers was cut off in the course of ransom negotiations. Police feared "other mutilations" if they were unable to find the man, but they did locate and raid the house this weekend, arresting five people in their 20s. (According to the BBC, French police used "phone signals" to locate the house.)
[...]
And a few weeks before that, attackers went to the home of someone whose son was a "crypto-influencer based in Dubai." At the father's home, the kidnappers "tied up [the father's] wife and daughter and forced him into a car. The man’s influencer son received a ransom demand and contacted police. The two women were then quickly freed. The father was only discovered 24 hours later in the boot of a car in Normandy, tied up and showing signs of physical violence, having been sprinkled with petrol."It's not just France, either. Early this year, three British men kidnapped another British man while all of them were in Spain; the kidnappers demanded 30,000 euros in crypto "or be tortured and killed." The kidnapped man escaped by jumping off a balcony 30 feet high, breaking both ankles.
Or there's the Belgian man who posted online that "his crypto wallet was now worth €1.6 million." His wife was the victim of an attempted abduction within weeks.
