Last month, a 24-year-old man from Peachtree City, Georgia, revealed that he was drugged, kidnapped, and robbed during a night out at a bar in Atlanta's popular Buckhead district in the summer of 2022. Now, other young men are also stepping forward to say they had similar experiences at Buckhead watering holes, with incidents detailed from November 2021 through February 2024. NBC News says it has talked with six men so far, as well as reviewed police reports for two others, with the alleged victims claiming that on the nights in question, they started feeling "abnormally intoxicated" while hanging out in various bars in Buckhead, including at the Five Paces Inn.
After that, they say, their cellphones were taken and thousands of dollars were transferred out of their bank accounts using mobile apps like Venmo, PayPal, and Zelle. Their credit cards were also used to make unauthorized purchases, they say. Other bars named include Thirty, Johnny's Hideaway, and the Ivy Buckhead. Chandler Rebel, the young man from Peachtree City, says he was robbed of about $13,000 after a visit to Five Paces in August 2022. He tells NBC that the last thing he recalls from that night is ordering a round of drinks with friends, then waking up in the back of a vehicle while being held down by a stranger.
"I just remember everything was black in there, trying to scream," he notes. Rebel says he passed out again, then woke up hours later, vomiting blood in a gas station bathroom a few miles from the bar. Police reports seen by the Atlanta Black Star show nearly five dozen such reported thefts at Five Paces over the past year. A couple of the men say that when they woke up, they were left with different phones and bank cards, possibly left as decoys to stall their realization that they'd been robbed.
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It's not clear how the victims' phones were allegedly hacked, though some of them speculate that hacking software was used, that the perps secretly watched them previously entering their passwords (or coaxed it out of them while they were drugged), or even broke into the phones via face ID by using the victims' faces while they were unconscious. Six men have reported their cases to authorities, and those cases remain open, a police spokesperson tells the news outlet. (More Atlanta stories.)
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