00:00Rising price is certainly a catalyst for the crime, but it's really the irreversible nature of crypto transactions.
00:06The fact that there are no protections, that really struck me and has led to this surge in brutal home invasions and kidnappings.
00:13That's correct. You know, a lot of the sort of traditional protections we have at traditional banks, FDIC, withdrawal limits,
00:20those don't quite exist in the same way at all in the crypto industry, which is fueling a lot of these tax because they're both irreversible and instantaneous.
00:30So I spent much of the last year sort of speaking to a lot of the victims of these crimes,
00:34including a particular crime spree over the course of, you know, one to two years that affected, you know, a half dozen victims involving physical attacks.
00:43And it's really quite horrific how some of these crimes have moved offline from from hacking to really brutal sort of injuries that have occurred in person through home invasions and so on.
00:54Yeah, I don't want to give away the whole story, and I encourage everybody to check it out on the Bloomberg Terminal and at Bloomberg.com.
00:59Austin, but in the couple of minutes that we have with you, can you talk a little bit about how this gang that you studied so closely for the last year was actually able to find victims to go after?
01:11You know, it was really interesting.
01:14I think a lot of the coverage about these types of physical attacks is focused on sort of high-flying, sort of, you know, unsympathetic figures.
01:21You see people showing off their Lamborghinis on TikTok and how they made all this wild money through crypto investments.
01:29What we really looked at is the victims that are sort of small-time investors and how they're increasingly becoming victims of these attacks.
01:36The gang that we looked at had sort of sourced them through things like leaks, various hacks, SIM swaps.
01:43These are sort of types of methods to access someone's account online to see what types of funds they have.
01:49And they really focused on people who had big enough sums that it made worth sort of attacking, but not too big where they might have extra security.
01:57So a lot of these attacks, they were looking at victims or targets in places like North Carolina, Texas, Florida, and a number of other states across the U.S., and also Canada as well.
02:08And they, again, were looking for targets that wouldn't be sort of suspecting that they would be attacked just because they were viewing these types of investments as not so different than a 401k.
02:18Right. I mean, people who had maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of crypto.
02:22So, Austin, what kind of recourse do people have very quickly here?
02:27There's not a lot of recourse.
02:28I mean, one of the really interesting things is that after these attacks took place, some of them did have they got nothing back, even in the cases of where they had a class, a lawsuit against someone that might have leaked their information.
02:42They all settled out of court, leading to not much sort of money coming back.
02:46But again, for the type of crimes that they sort of suffered, I'm talking about people who and forgive the listeners here, but they had fork stuck under their fingernails or they had they were held at gunpoint.
02:56Really disturbing stuff.
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