Seven members alleged to be members of the Hong Kong triad have been arrested in connection with the kidnapping of a cryptocurrency trader. The trader was held last year for ransom that amounted to roughly $3.8 million USD.
Seven Hong Kong Men Are Now Facing Life Imprisonment
The men have been arrested in mainland China and will be handed over to authorities in their native Hong Kong at the Shenzhen Bay border control point this week. Some of the suspects that were arrested include the alleged leader of the kidnapping plot, along with another digital currency trader who is accused of creating false transactions as a means of luring the victim to the Kowloon Bay industrial center, where he was abducted in early November 2021.
One of the suspected kidnapper’s homes was raided by police authorities about six days after the crime took place. This gave everyone involved the notion that it was time to run. All the suspects fled to the city of Shenzhen through illegal channels. The victim is said to have suffered several broken bones in both his legs and arms from alleged beatings he received from the illicit actors while he was abducted. Despite all this, no money was ever transferred to the kidnappers by the victim’s family.
However, it appears that perhaps has much as HK$35 million in Tether tokens – Tether being a popular and controversial stable token – may have been taken from the victim’s personal crypto wallet after potentially being forced to provide his password while under the kidnappers’ control. At the time of writing, abduction in both China and Hong Kong is punishable by life imprisonment, meaning all seven men could be spending the rest of their lives behind bars.
Crypto crime continues to mar the digital currency space. Not long ago, the Better Business Bureau (BBB)) announced that crypto-related fraud was now the second most dangerous and prominent in the world given how much it had grown over the past several years. While cases themselves are not all that frequent, the problem that stems from crypto scams is that they tend to take far more than the average scam, with each event draining victims by as much as $1200 or more.
This Kind of Thing Happens Too Often
In addition, crypto-based romance scams have become far more common, with scam organizations such as Crypto Rom growing tenfold in just the last year alone.
China has been one of the most controversial countries when it comes to digital currency activity. Despite housing roughly 65 to 75 percent of the world’s digital currency mining projects, last summer China shocked traders and investors everywhere when it announced that it was banning the practice as a means of becoming more carbon neutral. Not long after that, the country went further down the negative line by stating that all transactions would be next.
Source: https://www.livebitcoinnews.com/seven-men-from-hong-kong-arrested-following-alleged-kidnapping-of-crypto-trader/