Life imitates xkcd comic as Florida gang beats crypto password from retiree

Remy Ra St. Felix spent April 11, 2023, on a quiet avenue in a rented BMW X5, staking out the 76-year-old couple that he deliberate to rob the following day.

He had lately made the 11-hour drive up I-95 from southern Florida, the place he lived, to Durham, North Carolina. It was a great distance, however as with so many roles, occasional journey was the price of doing enterprise. That was true particularly when your small business was robbing folks of their cryptocurrency by breaking into their properties and threatening to chop off their balls and rape their wives.

St. Felix, a younger man of simply 25, had tried this line of labor nearer to residence at first, however it hadn’t gone nicely. A September 2022 residence invasion in Homestead, Florida, was imagined to carry St. Felix and his crew piles of crypto. All they needed to do was stick a gun to some poor schlub’s head and power him to log in to his on-line change after which switch the cash to accounts managed by the thieves. A easy plan—which labored advantageous till it turned out that the sufferer’s crypto accounts had far much less cash in them than deliberate.

Reasonably than waste the chance, St. Felix improvised. Court docket information confirmed that he tied the sufferer’s fingers, shoved him right into a automobile, and drove away. Contained in the automotive, the abductors filmed themselves beating the sufferer, who was visibly bleeding from the mouth and face. A gun was positioned to the sufferer’s neck, and he was pressured to document a plea for family and friends to ship cryptocurrency to safe the person’s launch. 5 such movies have been recorded within the automotive. The kidnapped man was ultimately discovered by police 120 miles from his residence.

A messy operation.

So St. Felix and his crew started to look out of state for brand new jobs. They robbed somebody in Little Elm, Texas, of $150,000 and two Rolex watches, however their consideration was ultimately drawn to a tidy residence on Wells Road in far-off Durham. The house owner there was believed to be a major crypto investor. (The crew had hacked into his e mail account to substantiate this.)

After his day of surveillance on April 11, St. Felix and his companion, Elmer Castro, drove to a neighborhood Walmart and bought their work uniforms: sun shades, a clipboard, reflective vests, and khaki pants. Again at their resort, St. Felix snapped a photograph of himself on this getup, which appeared shut sufficient to a building employee for his functions.

The subsequent morning at 7:30 am, St. Felix and Castro rolled as much as the Wells Road residence as soon as extra. As a substitute of surveilling it from down the block, they knocked on the door. The husband answered. The boys advised him some story involving crucial pipe inspections. They wandered across the residence for a couple of minutes, then knocked on the entrance door once more.

However this time, when the spouse answered, St. Felix and Castro have been sporting ski masks and sun shades—and so they had handguns. They pushed their method inside. The girl screamed, and her husband got here in from the kitchen to see all of them combating. The intruders punched the husband within the face and zip-tied the fingers and ft of each householders.

Castro dragged the spouse by her legs down the hallway and into the toilet. He stood guard over her, wielding his distinctive pink revolver.

Within the meantime, St. Felix had marched the husband at gunpoint right into a loft workplace behind the house. There, the threats got here shortly—St. Felix would minimize off the person’s toes, he mentioned, or his genitals. He would shoot him. He would rape his spouse. The one method out was to cooperate, and that meant serving to St. Felix log in to the person’s Coinbase account.

St. Felix, holding a black handgun and sporting a Bass Professional Store baseball cap, waited for the shocked husband’s settlement. When he received it, he minimize the person’s zip-ties and set him in entrance of the house workplace iMac.

The husband logged in to the pc, and St. Felix took over and downloaded the remote-control software program AnyDesk. He then opened up a Telegram audio name to the actual brains of the operation.

The precise theft was about to start.