Inside a violent gang's ruthless crypto-stealing home invasion spree

From the article (archive):

The United States Justice Department earlier this week announced the conviction of Remy Ra St. Felix, a 24-year-old Florida man who led a group of men behind a violent crime spree designed to compel victims to hand over access to their cryptocurrency savings. That announcement and the criminal complaint laying out charges against St. Felix focused largely on a single theft of cryptocurrency from an elderly North Carolina couple, whose home St. Felix and one of his accomplices broke into before physically assaulting the two victims—both in their seventies—and forcing them to transfer more than $150,000 in Bitcoin and Ether to the thieves' crypto wallets.

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The serial extortion spree is almost certainly the worst of its kind ever to be prosecuted in the US, says Jameson Lopp, the cofounder and chief security officer of Casa, a cryptocurrency-focused physical security firm, who has tracked physical attacks designed to steal cryptocurrency going back as far as 2014. “As far as I'm aware, this is the first case where it was confirmed that the same group of people went around and basically carried out home invasions on a variety of different victims,” Lopp says.

Lopp notes, nonetheless, that this kind of crime spree is more than a one-off. He has learned of other similar attempts at physical theft of cryptocurrency in just the past month that have escaped public reporting—he says the victims in those cases asked him not to share details—and suggests that in-person crypto extortion may be on the rise as thieves realize the attraction of crypto as a highly valuable and instantly transportable target for theft. “Crypto, as this highly liquid bearer asset, completely changes the incentives of doing something like a home invasion," Lopp says, “or even kidnapping and extortion and ransom.”

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Despite the potential of stealing crypto through that kind of physical coercion, St. Felix’s gang had remarkably little success extorting significant sums of cryptocurrency from victims. But it wasn't for lack of trying: One document written by prosecutors, which outlines the basis for a plea agreement for one of the gang’s lookout drivers, describes how the group began to form in 2021 and went on to carry out a series of brutal attacks involving 13 total members of the gang over the next two years in at least seven actual or planned operations in Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and New York, all targeting victims they believed to have large stashes of crypto.

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Overall, the risk-reward trade-offs of carrying out brutal home invasions like the ones in St. Felix's case don't make nearly as much sense as remote hacking for crypto theft, Janczewski points out, although both tactics are highly illegal and potentially ruinous for victims. St. Felix and his coconspirators made a relatively small amount of money in the long run, carried out highly risky physical intrusions, and now face years in prison. St. Felix himself, for instance, faces a mandatory minimum of seven years and a maximum of a life sentence.