Cybercriminals are well practiced at breaking into crypto owners’ online accounts to steal their DeFi wealth. However, one such gang has, until recently, been deploying real, on-the-ground burglars to break into crypto owners homes, threaten and beat them, and force them to fork over their digital money.
Last week, the Justice Department announced the sentencing of a majority of the members of that gang. One of the ringleaders, 25-year-old Remy Ra St Felix, was sentenced to 47 years in prison for his role in the violent robberies. The government said that, during a period of approximately two years, the gang stole over $3.5 million from various victims via a combination of the “violent home invasions,” as well as through online SIM swapping schemes.
In one particularly disturbing incident, the men broke into a home in North Carolina, and “violently assaulted” the couple who lived there. Ars Technica notes that the men initially approached the home dressed in construction worker outfits, claiming they wanted to inspect the local pipe systems. After they had cased the back of the home, they pushed their way inside and threatened the couple with guns. After attacking the man and threatening to sexually assault his wife, the men convinced him to go to his computer and open his Coinbase account. It was then that the cybercriminals attached to the plot took control of the victim’s account using the remote access software AnyDesk and proceeded to begin transferring the entirety of his account into accounts controlled by the gang. The men ultimately were able to squeeze $156,853 out of the man’s account before Coinbase froze their transfer attempts. After stealing the digital assets, the gang members left the couple, who then went and alerted neighbors about the break-in.
For their violent enforcement of the scheme, the two men who conducted the home invasion each received $22,267.65. Meanwhile, the remaining $112,000 was split between the other cybercriminals attached to the gang.
The men conducted other home invasions in Delray Beach and Homestead, Florida, as well as in Little Elm, Texas, and had planned additional ones in Fort Lauderdale and Orlando, Florida, as well as Georgia. “Throughout the conspiracy, the conspirators communicated via an encrypted messaging application to plan their crimes,” the government writes. “They identified targets and discussed how to gain entry to homes, the tools required to carry out the crimes, the technical aspects of cryptocurrency, and the patterns of life of their targets. They also circulated pictures of their targets and their targets’ homes.”
Despite the sophisticated, mafia-style tactics practiced by the men, they don’t seem to have understood how easy it is for the feds to trace cryptocurrency. In recent years, the government has developed advanced tools to chase digital assets across the internet. Despite this well known fact, some of the criminals didn’t do much to cover their trail. One of the home invaders opened a Coinbase account using a government ID on the day that the home invasion took place. And though the cybercriminals attached to the plot sought to launder the money via “anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies” and other ostensibly obfuscatory methods, the feds still managed to identify most of the people attached to the plot.
