Small crypto investors, retirees, teachers, and workers have now become targets of theft via home invasion, according to Bloomberg.
Julia Goodwin learned this twice. First, she and her husband Glenn were asleep in their Delray Beach home when tapping at the sliding glass door pulled them into the living room. They thought it was a bird. The light flipped on. The noise stopped. Then the glass exploded.
All of a sudden, there were guns pressed into her head and neck while demands came fast for her phone, laptop, and wallet access.
Since 2020, more than 215 physical crypto attacks have been recorded worldwide, with 2025 nearly doubling the prior year. Security tracker Jameson Lopp has said the real number is higher because many victims stay silent.
According to Bloomberg, the organizer of these crimes is a dude named Jarod Seemungal, better known as Meow, who was a genius at 14, basically living online, coding for games, and getting paid in Bitcoin.
But Jarod was robbed himself at gunpoint months later and decided to hire muscle. The Goodwin attack was meant to grab at least $200,000, believed to sit on Gemini. Three days later, the crew abducted a 20-year-old hacker, forced him to open empty Coinbase accounts, beat him, sent ransom videos, and then dumped him near I-95.
In Texas, associates burned a man with a hot iron and jammed utensils under his mother’s fingernails. He fled while they searched the yard for a hardware wallet. In another miss, Remy broke into an empty Airbnb wearing a delivery uniform, according to Bloomberg.
In July, as the goons staked out a retired New York firefighter believed to hold $200,000 across Coinbase and a Ledger device, the FBI moved. Agents arrested Remy at a turnpike McDonald’s. In his trunk sat zip ties and an AK-style rifle.
Sentencing was severe, though. Remy received 47 years for kidnapping conspiracy and wire fraud. Matt, a lookout who earned only $4,000 in seven months, got 12 years. Jarod is due for release in 2040.
US largest exchange limits protection as physical crypto attacks rise
Meanwhile, Coinbase (the largest crypto exchange in America) says its platform insurance mainly covers server breaches, not coercion. Allegedly, in one instance, machine-learning systems flagged irregular activity and stopped the final $9,145 transfer, not the prior $156,853. Coinbase says it balances stopping bad actors with customer access.
Julia still believes in crypto and blockchain, even after two attacks. Travel costs more now. Glenn’s health worsens. She told Jarod in court, “You’ve squandered everything that I worked so hard for.”
Meanwhile, Russian hackers are still draining crypto wallets linked to the massive LastPass breach in 2022, according to analysis from TRM Labs.
Back then, LastPass had admitted that attackers got into its systems by hacking a developer account. They stole parts of the company’s source code and technical tools. Later, the same hackers hit GoTo, the cloud provider where LastPass had stored encrypted vault backups. Those vaults held not just passwords, but in many cases, crypto wallet seed phrases and private keys.
“Depending on the length and complexity of your master password and iteration count setting, you may want to reset your master password,” warned LastPass.
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Source: https://www.cryptopolitan.com/crypto-thieves-terrorize-small-investors/
