Bizarre news from Moscow as a millionaire was taken hostage and forced to give up his Bitcoin wallet password. Andrey Lifanov was in his car as a van suddenly showed up and three masked men jumped out, handcuffed him with a bag over his head and took him in the van where he was threatened with a blowtorch to give up the password to his wallet with 250 Bitcoins on it.
"A Russian businessman has made a statement to police, claiming that masked men kidnapped him from his luxury car and intimidated him into revealing the key to his digital wallet with 250 bitcoins (around $17 million) on it...the criminals took his mobile phone, on which an app was allegedly installed, allowing access to the so-called digital wallet. On it, there were 250 bitcoins. The attackers forced the man to reveal the password to this wallet."
Note to self: Never carry around mobile access points to large sums of Bitcoin. But the oddest part of this story is that the hostage takers for some reason didn't withdraw anything.
"Lifanov had 250 bitcoins on his account....he was afraid for his life and gave the password, after which the kidnappers stopped the car and threw the prisoner out. Taking off the bag from his head, Lifanov found himself in some kind of forest. The driver of a passing car informed him that he was near the village of Saburovo in the Moscow region....After his release Lifanov caught a taxi and went straight to the police to write a statement. Interestingly, the criminals have not yet been able to get hold of the money as the bitcoins are still in Lifanov's account."
Yeah, after all that, the 250 Bitcoins are for some reason still untouched in his wallet. Did you 2FA them Lifanov??? Either way I'm glad they didn't get what they wanted and you can hodl on to your Bitcoins. I remember an EOS phishing scam back in 2018 which cost someone about 1500 EOS coins. At that time, 1 EOS was about 5 Dollars and has now four years later fallen downwards all the way into the 90 cent range. With Bitcoin, it could be a whoooole other story four years from now.
Now, you might think what my point is exactly in sharing this story. Well my friend, the moral here is what most of us actually already know but often forget to say out loud: We are not "criminals" for using Tornado Cash or Monero or ZCash, we mostly do so to protect ourselves from criminals. Whether they hold blowtorches or pens to write ludicrous laws.
