It's a story about two incredible crimes—the $243 million theft of cryptocurrency from a single person, and the brazen kidnapping of a wealthy couple in Connecticut. And as Mitch Moxley explains in a New York Times Magazine story, the crimes last year were connected, though it took awhile for authorities to figure that out. The cybertheft came first. Moxley explains how a group of young criminals conned a resident of DC—he was an early adopter of bitcoin— into surrendering his fortune by convincing him he was actually protecting it. But just as there are cyberthieves adept at this kind of thing, there are cyberdetectives adept at following the trail. One such sleuth obtained video said to be of the scammers celebrating their massive haul.
- "In private chats they used screen names like Swag, $$$ and Meech, but they made a crucial mistake. One of them flashed his Windows home screen, which revealed his real name in the start icon pop-up at the bottom of the screen: Veer Chetal, an 18-year-old from Danbury ..."
Which brings us to the kidnapping. The couple kidnapped were the parents of Chetal. Authorities say the group of young men who assaulted the couple and threw them in a van did so with the idea of ransoming them for some of the cyberheist money. Police, however, were able to follow the van and make arrests. The story similarly details arrests in the cyberheist—another "sloppy" move by one of the suspects in laundering his portion helped. These arrests came just a month after the crime and followed some mind-boggling spending sprees. (Read the full story.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
