Either you give me your bitcoins or I'll shoot you: some people steal bitcoins the old-fashioned way

If you invest in cryptocurrencies, maybe you should not say it very loudly: a few months ago someone hired a mercenary to threaten his friend at gunpoint: or gave him the keys to his virtual wallets (worth 1.8 million dollars) or put a bullet in his head.

The alleged perpetrators of this attempted robbery were arrested, but that was not the only case: this week we learned of the theft of 600 bitcoin mining machines in Iceland. Stealing cryptocurrencies electronically is fashionable, but beware, because traditional thefts, the 'offline', are also the order of the day.

Iceland, the paradise for miners

Eleven people were arrested in that robbery in Iceland, including one of the security guards in the data center from which those 600 machines were stolen, many of them ASICs dedicated to bitcoin mining. Those specialized computers to mine bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have not yet been located, but according to the research data they have a value of about 2 million dollars.

The operation consisted of four robberies, three of which occurred in December. The police did not make public the robberies with the aim of trying to find those responsible, who returned to action last January.

In Iceland, energy is especially cheap thanks to its use of geothermal and hydroelectric power plants, which has fostered the growth of data centers dedicated to cryptocurrency mining, in which large amounts of energy are consumed.

Bitcoins or life

This news joins other cases in which we are seeing how cryptocurrency thefts go beyond those massive thefts by hackers who manage to overcome various electronic security barriers.

The physical robberies have been happening in recent months. The case mentioned in which Louis Meza is certainly particularly striking: Meza hired someone to point a gun at his friend after putting him in a van and asking for his private access keys to his ETH virtual wallet. For the Manhattan district attorney who handled the case, this event demonstrated "the growing common intersection between cybercrime and violent crime."

In the United Kingdom, a similar robbery occurred last January: a group of masked men invaded the house of an investor in cryptocurrency, tied his wife, left his little boy in a cart outside the house and threatened him: transferred their bitcoins, or there could happen everything.

Finally, no one was injured in the robbery, and now the police are investigating a case that could be the first of many. The head of the Department of Organized Crime at Scotland Yard's, Mick Gallagher, indicated how many bands are showing interest in cryptocurrency: "at the moment it seems that there is significant growth"

Investors begin to become paranoid

These cases are becoming a real threat to cryptocurrency investors, some of whom have achieved incredible benefits in their operations.

The events that are taking place in this area are causing some investors to begin to take action in this regard. In Ukraine, the CEO of a financial company dedicated to cryptocurrency was kidnapped at the end of last year and released after paying a ransom of one million dollars.

The use of physical purses is one of the measures that many investors are taking, but some are going beyond these indignities.

The user of Reddit Grrumpynitis explained in one of the threads of debate there how he ended up using an ingenious system based on an (apparently innocent) video file. He ended up changing the method and using one of the famous Ledger Nano S (which he gutted to make sure the device had not been hacked before shipping) to protect his cryptocurrencies.

Even so, he went further and protected those purses with sets of words that he distributed in different envelopes sealed and stored in different physical locations. Only a few people different from each other know the location of the different envelopes so that as he commented the risk of theft was minimized to the maximum.

Other investors who have long been active in the different communities participating in the cryptocurrency debate are suffering the consequences of being so participatory: they feel watched, something that has led them to recommend studying in-depth security of domestic security systems, in addition, to distribute access codes to physical storage (also known as 'cold storage') with systems such as the Shamir scheme.

Investing in cryptocurrency is becoming increasingly dangerous, it seems.