A pair of Russian residents will soon be tried for a robbery that involved the theft of cryptocurrency from a local miner. The stolen funds have been valued at millions of rubles. The virtual coins were taken from the miner at gunpoint, said local authorities. Both criminals were taken into custody.
The Kirovsky Court will soon try the men for their attack. The miner was a resident of the Siberian city of Tomsk and earns his living through crypto mining. The thieves managed to extort coins valued at over 360 million rubles at that time (more than $4.8 million USD), according to cryptocurrency news outlet Bits.media.
The theft took place back in October of 2021. The two men attacked the miner while he was attempting to leave his home. One of the men threatened the miner with an object that resembled a firearm and ordered him to go back inside his apartment.
After that, his accomplice entered the apartment, and the pair forced the miner to sign into his crypto exchange account and transfer a total of 86 Bitcoins to them from a wallet containing 90 Bitcoins. It’s not entirely clear why the pair made the decision not to take the entire balance.
Russian police were able to locate and arrest one of the two suspects in St. Petersburg. That individual plead guilty and has given back the fiat equivalent of what was determined to be his portion of the stolen virtual funds — 35 million rubles (approximately $479,000 USD). The second male was arrested at a later time.
The local prosecutor’s office has officially charged both men with “robbery committed by a group of persons on an especially large scale” under the Russian Federation’s Criminal Code. They each now face as many as 15 years in prison, as well as fines as high as 1 million rubles.
The number of assaults on individuals who earn and own cryptocurrencies in Russia has been steadily climbing. In 2021, armed robbers broke into a large crypto mining farm located near Moscow, taking several dozen of the video cards that are used to mint virtual currencies. In 2022, $1 million worth of tether was stolen from a cryptocurrency trader in Russia’s capital city of Moscow.