My friend went to Washington DC for a vacation and got mugged with a gun. The muggers made her enter her iCloud password (which she was having trouble remembering) so they could turn off the "find my iPhone" feature so they could sell the iPhone. When she stumbled for the second time, one of the two guys said "let's just shoot her and get out of here" the implication being that by the time the cops had come they would have offloaded the iPhone to someone else.
Thankfully she entered it correctly the third time, but it kinda changed my opinion on remote bricking. I don't want someone to want to kill me just so they can make $400 before I can brick the device.