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This is starting to look like a recurring theme. A similar incident happened this summer in Estonia [0], kidnappers from abroad travelled to Tallinn for the exp

This is starting to look like a recurring theme. A similar incident happened this summer in Estonia [0], kidnappers from abroad travelled to Tallinn for the express purpose of kidnapping the owner of a crypto casino who resides there. Like it or not, information about wealth is starting to look like a serious safety concern, especially in crypto where retrieving the funds later is practically impossible. [0] https://news.err.ee/1609499827/attempted-abduction-of-australian-casinos-businessman-foiled-in-tallinn https://news.err.ee/1609499827/attempted-abduction-of-austra...

mvdtnz 2y ago
Great idea to have your bank balance on a ledger that's publicly available. Another home run from the crypto lads.
- akimbostrawman 2y ago
  BTC isn't all of crypto
- Etheryte 2y ago
  While it's very hip to make fun of crypto bros, this isn't unique to crypto. You can easily approximate the net wealth of any company owner in the EU for example, since business registries are open (who owns how much of what company) as well as yearly financial statements (how much are the company's assets worth in a fiscal year). This isn't unique to the EU, it's simply the market I'm personally more familiar with, but I hope you see my point. What makes crypto unique in this setting is that it's easy for the kidnappers to receive ransom in a way that's very hard to trace back to them after the fact.
  - hibikir 2y ago
    It's not just about receiving the ransom, but how easy it can be to access the original funds. The story of, say, someone successfully kidnapping Bezos in a lightning operation and trying to take a good bite of his wealth is quite different than the same if you kidnapped Satoshi while he has access to his keys. It's not even in the tracing, but how much you can take away successfully, and how fast.
    - miohtama 2y ago
      It's about ransom, not about keys. Fortune 500 company CEOs and such have a special insurance for the cases like this. There is an old movie Proof of Life about the topic.
    - cbsmith 2y ago
      It'd be trivial for Bezos to take out a loan for a ransom to buy crypto in a new account, and then transfer it to another crypto account.
      - shkkmo 2y ago
        While being held captive and done in a way that doesn't give away the location of the kidnappers? The larger the loan Bezos takes, the harder that will be. The extremely wealthy like Bezos have contingency plans and systems for this situation.
        echoangle 2y ago
        > While being held captive and done in a way that doesn't give away the location of the kidnappers? I’m assuming it wouldn’t be Bezos himself doing it. You would contact his employees and tell them to get you the crypto if they want him back.
        shkkmo 2y ago
        Which assumes those staff doesn't have instructions on how to handle such a situation.
        echoangle 2y ago
        Why? Would the instructions be different from „do what the kidnappers say and get the money back from the insurance“?
        shkkmo 2y ago
  - lottin 2y ago
    > You can easily approximate the net wealth of any company owner in the EU I don't see how. Unless you're talking about a people who owns a significant percentage of a publicly-traded company, but that's most certainly not "any company owner". Probably less than 1% of the population.
    - Etheryte 2y ago
      The entries in EU business registries are public for all companies, not just publicly traded companies. You can check who owns how much of what company and you can also check their yearly reports. In most countries this comes at a small fee for the registry extract, but the information is readily available, in some countries it's even free. As an example, here's the Estonian business registry extract for the company Foobar OÜ (I'm not affiliated, I just searched for foobar) [0]. This is not a publicly traded company, yet you can see who owns the company in what fraction and if you download the latest annual report you can also see how much the company is worth. This information is legally required to be available to prevent money laundering, fraud, other financial crimes, etc. [0] https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/12199449/Foobar-O%C3%9C https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/12199449/Foobar-O%C3%...
      - miohtama 2y ago
        Business registries are no longer open, as there was a court case in Luxenbourg where one of Putin's fixers lobbied to get his private information closed. Ultimate Beneficiar Ownership information can be only accessed by authorities.
        Etheryte 2y ago
        Well, I don't know about you, but I can see the beneficiaries in the above example just fine, and last I checked I was not part of an authority.
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        When I search for ‘Toyota’, none of the results list the ultimate beneficiary owners. e.g. ‘ Toyota Baltic Aktsiaselts (10234087)’ lists 1 senior manager under ‘Beneficial owners’… which is clearly nonsense. He probably doesn’t even own 50% of the intermediary company registered in Estonia… let alone 100%. Edit: And ‘SIA Toyota Material Handling Baltic Eesti filiaal (11629379)’ doesn’t list anyone at all in that section.
  - Aerroon 2y ago
    Apparently the tax returns in Norway for everyone are public information. I'm surprised this hasn't caused enough problems that we would hear about it in news articles.
    - NotLongNow 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - pavlov 2y ago
      It’s the same in Sweden and Finland. Turns out that in a functioning society, it’s not a big deal if someone knows how much money you made last year. Thieves and kidnappers are not lurking around every corner after all. Money and nudity are still the great taboos for Americans. These national obsessions must be closely guarded or some kind of calamity will consume the sinners who exposed their bodies and bank accounts.
      - Loughla 2y ago
        I think it's less about morals and more about social safety net? When you're at the bottom in a country that has decent safety nets for you isn't as bad as the US. And once you've done one crime, the rest get easier to justify, I would assume.
      - ghaff 2y ago
        In the US, compensation of top-earners of public companies (and non-profits) is public information in annual reports and, even if it weren't, you can pretty much assume a top exec of a large public company is fairly wealthy. "Average" people may not share their wealth in general (in part because they may not want friends and family to know they have a lot of money) but it's no secret that the CEO or SVP of a Fortune 500 company has a ton of money.
    - tokai 2y ago
      Maybe it has caused problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hagen_(businessman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hagen_(businessman)
    - deleted 2y ago
  - dylan604 2y ago
    It's also common for wealthy companies to have KNR (kidnap and ransom) insurance policies for their key people. It's not unlike why some companies have policies where the key people are not allowed to travel together so an incident doesn't take them all out at once. Just another example of where crypto thinking they are hip/trendy for breaking the norms. Some lessons of bucking the traditional methods are gonna hurt more than others.
  - xethos 2y ago
    > easy for the kidnappers to receive ransom in a way that's very hard to trace back to them after the fact This is actually less true than you assume (barring Monero). Crypto, and Bitcoin especially, is less (less, though not yet completely) of a Wild West due to Western nations enforcing KYC laws. Through this, addresses can be traced back to real people. Further chain analysis (Chainalysis is the name I'm most familiar with) allows investigators to follow the money through an immutible chain stretching back to 2008. In short, Bitcoin is not private. It is arguably one of the least private ways to transact, considering the Blockchain will show the history of every wallet, and where every Sat started and ended. Unless you take enormous precautions, it can be traced back to you. Whether the feds can get to you is another story, but one as old as time.
- IncreasePosts 2y ago
  The address isn't tied to you, so how would anyone figure it out? Just knowing he's CEO of a crypto company means he probably has a lot of crypto.
  - meowster 2y ago
    > The address isn't tied to you, so how would anyone figure it out? Yes it is tied to you, when you spend it.
    - djbusby 2y ago
      Tornados.
    - IncreasePosts 2y ago
      Tied to you at your exchange - but publicly? Unless the argument is that hackers have infiltrated all the major exchanges
      - meowster 2y ago
        So now people have to trust complete strangers that work at the exchanges that they will never leak, tip-off, etc?
        IncreasePosts 2y ago
        No, but there is a pretty small set of people who can access the information. It's not like anyone with a grudge can link a Bitcoin address to a real life person.
        meowster 2y ago
        > The address isn't tied to you, so how would anyone figure it out? Or > there is a pretty small set of people who can access the information. Which one is it?
duped 2y ago
It sounds more like being involved in crypto than being publicly wealthy is a security concern. Which is unsurprising. It's almost like the crypto markets attract criminals!
- mschuster91 2y ago
  > It sounds more like being involved in crypto than being publicly wealthy is a security concern. Which is unsurprising. In Munich we have a serious problem with watch-robbers snatching people's expensive watches while driving on a motorcycle. Utterly insane but also utterly profitable if you have channels where to sell stolen watches.
  - NotLongNow 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - cogman10 2y ago
    I looked it up, these are like $100k->$500k watches being stolen. How often is that actually happening? Also, this seems like it could easily be an insurance scam. It seems just a little insane for someone to be casually walking around with a half million dollar watch on their wrist and some thief just happens to know "Hey, that looks like a half million dollar watch!"
    - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
      > How often is that actually happening? I mean if you can move that watch in a way that doesn't get you caught for 1/4 of it's retail price, twice a year, that's a decent salary. Doesn't need to happen all that much.
      - cogman10 2y ago
        Right, but that requires there to be an identifiable and large enough population of people wandering around with such watches on their wrists. I guess what I'm saying is I can understand a lot better how the "kia boyz" thing happened. There are a lot of easily identifiable kias everywhere. But luxury watches just seems so niche that it's hard to think someone stealing them would be a crime wave.
mattigames 2y ago
Not long ago the father of Luis Diaz, a famous Colombian soccer player that plays for Liverpool was kidnapped for ransom money by a armed group in Colombia, the official declaration is that he was returned without paying the ransom -but people highly doubt that to be true-, anyone whose wealth is public knowledge is at risk, specially in countries with organized crime. As you may guess his father and other close relatives no longer reside in Colombia.
celdon25 2y ago
Starting to? > He says Skurka's abduction is the 171st instance of suspects using physical violence to steal bitcoins, that he's aware of.
- PittleyDunkin 2y ago
  171 instances seems astonishingly low given how much crypto is designed to be stolen.
  - akimbostrawman 2y ago
    How are cryptographic keys designed to be stolen? If anything it's the opposite.
    - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
      No protection against a gun to your head? That seems pretty obvious.
      - akimbostrawman 2y ago
        That works for digital money and cash too, there have been many cases where people get forced at gun point to take out money from ATMs. Cryptocurrencies have the unique protection that _nobody_ who does not have the keys can access the funds. No system by itself can protects against violence resulting in coerced access.
        PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        > That works for digital money and cash too, there have been many cases where people get forced at gun point to take out money from ATMs. Not with the ease with which you can transfer an unbounded amount of crypto. Completely different situation. The lack of any kind of fraud or theft protection or need to physically access cash is a great reason to not ever cop to owning crypto.
Mountain_Skies 2y ago
Similar thing almost happened in a small town I used to live in. A local teen had accumulated a bunch of crypto, probably bragged about it somewhere online, and there was a group of half a dozen or so teens from another state who traveled to our town with plans to kidnap the local teen and force him to give them his crypto. Someone tipped off the local sheriff, who intercepted and arrested the out of state teens before they could actually kidnap the local teen.
emporas 2y ago
Any form of (extraordinary) wealth sooner or later will attract fearless men, who want to make it big and quickly. Cortes for example when he found out where the empire's gold was hidden he kidnapped Montezuma. Pretty blatant criminal activity. In no history books is mentioned any kind of wrong doing by the gold side. Gold doesn't do stuff it is an inanimate object, only humans with agency can perform actions, and be guilty of them or innocent. Victims of kidnapping for BTC, they can only hope BTC's price go to zero, long before 2030. By 2030 it's price will be 0 for sure, the economics of the blockchain ensure that, but they could be lucky and BTC's price crashes and zero's out the next 3 months or so. They will not be wealthy any more, the kidnappers will lose interest in them and throw them out in landfill somewhere, hopefully alive.
danielmarkbruce 2y ago
Hedge funder Eddie Lampert was kidnapped 20 years ago. This kind of thing has always existed.
- tonyedgecombe 2y ago
  Closer to home, Charles Geschke (Adobe founder) in 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Geschke#1992_kidnapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Geschke#1992_kidnappin...
scoofy 2y ago
I've said this explicitly for years... in this forum... everyone is going to love crypto until the kidnappings start. Anonymous transfers of large sums of money are rarely beneficial except in societies where crypto is already illegal.

mvdtnz 2y ago

Great idea to have your bank balance on a ledger that's publicly available. Another home run from the crypto lads.

akimbostrawman 2y ago
BTC isn't all of crypto
Etheryte 2y ago
While it's very hip to make fun of crypto bros, this isn't unique to crypto. You can easily approximate the net wealth of any company owner in the EU for example, since business registries are open (who owns how much of what company) as well as yearly financial statements (how much are the company's assets worth in a fiscal year). This isn't unique to the EU, it's simply the market I'm personally more familiar with, but I hope you see my point. What makes crypto unique in this setting is that it's easy for the kidnappers to receive ransom in a way that's very hard to trace back to them after the fact.
- hibikir 2y ago
  It's not just about receiving the ransom, but how easy it can be to access the original funds. The story of, say, someone successfully kidnapping Bezos in a lightning operation and trying to take a good bite of his wealth is quite different than the same if you kidnapped Satoshi while he has access to his keys. It's not even in the tracing, but how much you can take away successfully, and how fast.
  - miohtama 2y ago
    It's about ransom, not about keys. Fortune 500 company CEOs and such have a special insurance for the cases like this. There is an old movie Proof of Life about the topic.
  - cbsmith 2y ago
    It'd be trivial for Bezos to take out a loan for a ransom to buy crypto in a new account, and then transfer it to another crypto account.
    - shkkmo 2y ago
      While being held captive and done in a way that doesn't give away the location of the kidnappers? The larger the loan Bezos takes, the harder that will be. The extremely wealthy like Bezos have contingency plans and systems for this situation.
      - echoangle 2y ago
        > While being held captive and done in a way that doesn't give away the location of the kidnappers? I’m assuming it wouldn’t be Bezos himself doing it. You would contact his employees and tell them to get you the crypto if they want him back.
        shkkmo 2y ago
        Which assumes those staff doesn't have instructions on how to handle such a situation.
        echoangle 2y ago
        Why? Would the instructions be different from „do what the kidnappers say and get the money back from the insurance“?
        shkkmo 2y ago
- lottin 2y ago
  > You can easily approximate the net wealth of any company owner in the EU I don't see how. Unless you're talking about a people who owns a significant percentage of a publicly-traded company, but that's most certainly not "any company owner". Probably less than 1% of the population.
  - Etheryte 2y ago
    The entries in EU business registries are public for all companies, not just publicly traded companies. You can check who owns how much of what company and you can also check their yearly reports. In most countries this comes at a small fee for the registry extract, but the information is readily available, in some countries it's even free. As an example, here's the Estonian business registry extract for the company Foobar OÜ (I'm not affiliated, I just searched for foobar) [0]. This is not a publicly traded company, yet you can see who owns the company in what fraction and if you download the latest annual report you can also see how much the company is worth. This information is legally required to be available to prevent money laundering, fraud, other financial crimes, etc. [0] https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/12199449/Foobar-O%C3%9C https://ariregister.rik.ee/eng/company/12199449/Foobar-O%C3%...
    - miohtama 2y ago
      Business registries are no longer open, as there was a court case in Luxenbourg where one of Putin's fixers lobbied to get his private information closed. Ultimate Beneficiar Ownership information can be only accessed by authorities.
      - Etheryte 2y ago
        Well, I don't know about you, but I can see the beneficiaries in the above example just fine, and last I checked I was not part of an authority.
        MichaelZuo 2y ago
        When I search for ‘Toyota’, none of the results list the ultimate beneficiary owners. e.g. ‘ Toyota Baltic Aktsiaselts (10234087)’ lists 1 senior manager under ‘Beneficial owners’… which is clearly nonsense. He probably doesn’t even own 50% of the intermediary company registered in Estonia… let alone 100%. Edit: And ‘SIA Toyota Material Handling Baltic Eesti filiaal (11629379)’ doesn’t list anyone at all in that section.
- Aerroon 2y ago
  Apparently the tax returns in Norway for everyone are public information. I'm surprised this hasn't caused enough problems that we would hear about it in news articles.
  - NotLongNow 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - pavlov 2y ago
    It’s the same in Sweden and Finland. Turns out that in a functioning society, it’s not a big deal if someone knows how much money you made last year. Thieves and kidnappers are not lurking around every corner after all. Money and nudity are still the great taboos for Americans. These national obsessions must be closely guarded or some kind of calamity will consume the sinners who exposed their bodies and bank accounts.
    - Loughla 2y ago
      I think it's less about morals and more about social safety net? When you're at the bottom in a country that has decent safety nets for you isn't as bad as the US. And once you've done one crime, the rest get easier to justify, I would assume.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      In the US, compensation of top-earners of public companies (and non-profits) is public information in annual reports and, even if it weren't, you can pretty much assume a top exec of a large public company is fairly wealthy. "Average" people may not share their wealth in general (in part because they may not want friends and family to know they have a lot of money) but it's no secret that the CEO or SVP of a Fortune 500 company has a ton of money.
  - tokai 2y ago
    Maybe it has caused problems. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hagen_(businessman) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Hagen_(businessman)
  - deleted 2y ago
- dylan604 2y ago
  It's also common for wealthy companies to have KNR (kidnap and ransom) insurance policies for their key people. It's not unlike why some companies have policies where the key people are not allowed to travel together so an incident doesn't take them all out at once. Just another example of where crypto thinking they are hip/trendy for breaking the norms. Some lessons of bucking the traditional methods are gonna hurt more than others.
- xethos 2y ago
  > easy for the kidnappers to receive ransom in a way that's very hard to trace back to them after the fact This is actually less true than you assume (barring Monero). Crypto, and Bitcoin especially, is less (less, though not yet completely) of a Wild West due to Western nations enforcing KYC laws. Through this, addresses can be traced back to real people. Further chain analysis (Chainalysis is the name I'm most familiar with) allows investigators to follow the money through an immutible chain stretching back to 2008. In short, Bitcoin is not private. It is arguably one of the least private ways to transact, considering the Blockchain will show the history of every wallet, and where every Sat started and ended. Unless you take enormous precautions, it can be traced back to you. Whether the feds can get to you is another story, but one as old as time.
IncreasePosts 2y ago
The address isn't tied to you, so how would anyone figure it out? Just knowing he's CEO of a crypto company means he probably has a lot of crypto.
- meowster 2y ago
  > The address isn't tied to you, so how would anyone figure it out? Yes it is tied to you, when you spend it.
  - djbusby 2y ago
    Tornados.
  - IncreasePosts 2y ago
    Tied to you at your exchange - but publicly? Unless the argument is that hackers have infiltrated all the major exchanges
    - meowster 2y ago
      So now people have to trust complete strangers that work at the exchanges that they will never leak, tip-off, etc?
      - IncreasePosts 2y ago
        No, but there is a pretty small set of people who can access the information. It's not like anyone with a grudge can link a Bitcoin address to a real life person.
        meowster 2y ago
        > The address isn't tied to you, so how would anyone figure it out? Or > there is a pretty small set of people who can access the information. Which one is it?

duped 2y ago

It sounds more like being involved in crypto than being publicly wealthy is a security concern. Which is unsurprising. It's almost like the crypto markets attract criminals!

mschuster91 2y ago
> It sounds more like being involved in crypto than being publicly wealthy is a security concern. Which is unsurprising. In Munich we have a serious problem with watch-robbers snatching people's expensive watches while driving on a motorcycle. Utterly insane but also utterly profitable if you have channels where to sell stolen watches.
- NotLongNow 2y ago
  [flagged]
- cogman10 2y ago
  I looked it up, these are like $100k->$500k watches being stolen. How often is that actually happening? Also, this seems like it could easily be an insurance scam. It seems just a little insane for someone to be casually walking around with a half million dollar watch on their wrist and some thief just happens to know "Hey, that looks like a half million dollar watch!"
  - ToucanLoucan 2y ago
    > How often is that actually happening? I mean if you can move that watch in a way that doesn't get you caught for 1/4 of it's retail price, twice a year, that's a decent salary. Doesn't need to happen all that much.
    - cogman10 2y ago
      Right, but that requires there to be an identifiable and large enough population of people wandering around with such watches on their wrists. I guess what I'm saying is I can understand a lot better how the "kia boyz" thing happened. There are a lot of easily identifiable kias everywhere. But luxury watches just seems so niche that it's hard to think someone stealing them would be a crime wave.

mattigames 2y ago

Not long ago the father of Luis Diaz, a famous Colombian soccer player that plays for Liverpool was kidnapped for ransom money by a armed group in Colombia, the official declaration is that he was returned without paying the ransom -but people highly doubt that to be true-, anyone whose wealth is public knowledge is at risk, specially in countries with organized crime. As you may guess his father and other close relatives no longer reside in Colombia.

celdon25 2y ago

Starting to? > He says Skurka's abduction is the 171st instance of suspects using physical violence to steal bitcoins, that he's aware of.

PittleyDunkin 2y ago
171 instances seems astonishingly low given how much crypto is designed to be stolen.
- akimbostrawman 2y ago
  How are cryptographic keys designed to be stolen? If anything it's the opposite.
  - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
    No protection against a gun to your head? That seems pretty obvious.
    - akimbostrawman 2y ago
      That works for digital money and cash too, there have been many cases where people get forced at gun point to take out money from ATMs. Cryptocurrencies have the unique protection that _nobody_ who does not have the keys can access the funds. No system by itself can protects against violence resulting in coerced access.
      - PittleyDunkin 2y ago
        > That works for digital money and cash too, there have been many cases where people get forced at gun point to take out money from ATMs. Not with the ease with which you can transfer an unbounded amount of crypto. Completely different situation. The lack of any kind of fraud or theft protection or need to physically access cash is a great reason to not ever cop to owning crypto.

Mountain_Skies 2y ago

Similar thing almost happened in a small town I used to live in. A local teen had accumulated a bunch of crypto, probably bragged about it somewhere online, and there was a group of half a dozen or so teens from another state who traveled to our town with plans to kidnap the local teen and force him to give them his crypto. Someone tipped off the local sheriff, who intercepted and arrested the out of state teens before they could actually kidnap the local teen.

emporas 2y ago

Any form of (extraordinary) wealth sooner or later will attract fearless men, who want to make it big and quickly. Cortes for example when he found out where the empire's gold was hidden he kidnapped Montezuma. Pretty blatant criminal activity. In no history books is mentioned any kind of wrong doing by the gold side. Gold doesn't do stuff it is an inanimate object, only humans with agency can perform actions, and be guilty of them or innocent. Victims of kidnapping for BTC, they can only hope BTC's price go to zero, long before 2030. By 2030 it's price will be 0 for sure, the economics of the blockchain ensure that, but they could be lucky and BTC's price crashes and zero's out the next 3 months or so. They will not be wealthy any more, the kidnappers will lose interest in them and throw them out in landfill somewhere, hopefully alive.

danielmarkbruce 2y ago

Hedge funder Eddie Lampert was kidnapped 20 years ago. This kind of thing has always existed.

tonyedgecombe 2y ago
Closer to home, Charles Geschke (Adobe founder) in 1992. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Geschke#1992_kidnapping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Geschke#1992_kidnappin...

scoofy 2y ago

I've said this explicitly for years... in this forum... everyone is going to love crypto until the kidnappings start. Anonymous transfers of large sums of money are rarely beneficial except in societies where crypto is already illegal.