Wife of Norwegian billionare kidnapped, €9M crypto ransom | Hacker News Reader

Wife of Norwegian billionare kidnapped, €9M crypto ransom

telegraph.co.uk

68 pointsxlance29 comments

If I were worth 120 million and my wife were ransomed for 9 mil, I'd pay the 9 ransom to get her back, and then I would put another 9 mil bounty on the heads of the people who kidnapped her.

It's not clear that she lived past the day of the kidnapping. TFA indicates there has been no proof of life.

> "“Police have so far advised the family not to meet the requirements.”

This is good advice from their point of view because it lowers the incentive to commit these types of crimes in the future.

For the individual person, it is most wise to pay the ransom and ignore what law enforcement tells you if you want to see the person back.

Yet at the same time, as an individual criminal there is no incentive to actually return the person or even keep them alive once payment has been recieved

This is true, but in practice there's a good chance they will be released if you pay. I don't have statistics on this on hand, but from cursory knowledge I'd be surprised if it was less than 70%-80% of the time a ransom was paid, the person would be freed. Statistics on that sort of thing are hard anyway because many kidnappings go unreported.

Ethics aside, killing the person after you receive your ransom simply worsens your punishment for little gain (provided the hostage can't identify you). Besides, should you want to take future hostages, it lowers the likelihood of being paid.

Of course there's an incentive to not kill them.

Most people don't actually enjoy murdering innocent people, and if the police found the dead body then it's a murder investigation which would be taken more seriously than a kidnapping/ransom.

All they'd need to do is blindfold the victim and drop them at a random location. It'd be much less risk than disposing of a corpse.

This is why it should be illegal to pay a ransom

When you develop a tool, you have to consider the pros and the cons. For example, encrypted chat, while it may have bad uses, the vast majority of uses are good or at least benign. With cryptocurrency on the other hand, it seems like the bad uses are the majority: fraud, money laundering, illegal drugs, and extortion. In the past, the money exchange in an extortion scheme was always the weak point. Now, thanks to cryptocurrencies, it is the strong point.

Missing since October 31st, this is horrible.

This is terrible. I wonder, what is the comment about the ransom note intended to signify? That the kidnappers are not Norwegian? ISTM that extreme confidence would be required to commit a crime of this nature in a foreign country.

It signifies that either a foreigner or recent immigrant, or perhaps a dyslectic or anyone who would like it to appear as if a foreigner or recent immigrant or a dyslectic wrote the note.

Yes, for native speaker would not happen that they change writing from normal fluency. What gain can be from changing normal grammatics or to use left hand?

Verily the poorly-skilled can never write better, and the better never poorer.

But are there known 'kidnap ransomers' that could be deduced through language? It seems unlikely, I guess, unless Norway has enough local variances that would give a native speaker away through dialect.

First as far as the note, I would not assume that the individuals responsible are foreign or domestic based on the content. Something as simple as Google Translate can provide pretty good obfuscation, if you are fluent in Norwegian even better (I however am wholly unfamiliar with the language so will use a different example)

---

Original English text: "Unless five million dollars are transferred to the following numbered account in seven days, I will capsize five tankers in the Ellingson fleet."

Google translation to German: "Wenn nicht innerhalb von sieben Tagen fünf Millionen Dollar auf das folgende Konto überwiesen werden, werde ich fünf Tanker der Ellingson-Flotte kentern."

Google translation back to English: "Unless five million dollars are transferred to the following account within seven days, I will capsize five tankers from the Ellingson fleet."

From there I can now manually change things with my fluency in the language "Unless million five dollars will be transferred to the following account within a time of seven days, will capsize five tankers from the Ellingson armada." and I've now drastically obfuscated any nationality/regionality/level of education that could be deduced from my request.

Or translate the German-English output to Spanish and back I get "Unless five million dollars are transferred to the next account within seven days, I will capsize five tankers from the Ellingson fleet." Which again gives me something that, at first glance, makes me seem like a non-native English speaker.

---

>extreme confidence would be required to commit a crime of this nature in a foreign country.

I wouldn't say any more confidence than normal.

You could do the grab with 3-5 people with only a week on the ground prior to the grab if she regularly left the house.

Being Norway, and they're only worth about 200 million USD, I imagine she had no personal security detail, possibly a driver with minimal training (possibly just their assistant) and likely isn't instantly recognizable by the masses.

With no one on the inside you simply find a routine. Does she go to a social club regularly? Does she do philanthropic work somewhere? Does she like to do her own grocery shopping? Does she regularly visit one or more of her children? Were any schools in the area having any events being done by her grandchildren?

You figure out where she's going to be and when and it gets pretty easy. Intercept along the assumed route, ideally in a low-traffic area, or grab her.

Some quick research says they 'live a secluded lifestyle'. The population of their town isn't even 35k with at least 6500 of those being from other countries of origin (the majority of which from non-white nations) meaning someone with an accent/of a different race would not stick out whatsoever.

Given the size of the town I'm very willing to bed she does her own groceries, and other errands, and with some familiarity of Western and Northern Europeans they'll frequent the grocery/market weekly at a minimum due to generally smaller refrigerators/freezers as well as kitchens.

Casually approach her on the sidewalk with something appearing to be a firearm "Ma'am, remain calm and please come with us", fear and relatively casual guiding could have been enough to put her in a vehicle without a scene. From there you drive to any of the 1650 miles of sea boarder or to any number of fjords or bays and casually leave with her.

Could easily be domestic but there's zero readily available evidence here to suggest foreign kidnappers would have balked at the idea.

*very willing to bet

Freudian slip or something.

This happened at Halloween but the police asked the media to not report it and they seemingly complied.

Is this kind of arrangement unique to Norway?

No, a lot of media outlets will not report on something that will definitely put someone’s life in immediate danger, unless the public interest outweighs the risk. In this case the public interest is well served as long as it’s eventually reported, and a scoop at the cost of a life would be pointless and cruel. It doesn’t always work out of course, and the smaller a media org is the less likely they are to abide by norms.

Norway has public tax records. This is one of the potential flaws of an otherwise, kinda cool openness. You can't be rich and have a 'normal' life. You have money in Norway, you have to have walls, staff, etc. just to have a bit of safety.

We know that Trump or X billionaire is rich enough to pay ~ $11 Million in ransom, even though no one has seen his taxes. Now is their wife worth that much...? :) They'd have to act as if they care either way

Public tax records might have flaws, but they certainly aren't where the blame for this problem would lie.

This seems completely out of touch with the reality in Norway.

In this case police suspect that he was targeted due to a public news story about him making a lot of money on something or other a while back.

The public tax record don’t really play much into this. There are plenty of other sources of information about who is wealthy or not. Usually for burglary, you’re target based on the area you live in.

And all in all Norway is extremely safe.

These kinds of things need to be considered when arguing about privacy: you could argue that having completely private payments with no link possible to the receiver is bad, because it facilitates this type of crime: Before crypto, you had to either demand money to a bank account (traceable) or demand cash on a certain location (which could then be surveiled by police to find the criminals).

I'm not saying there are kidnappings because there is crypto, but maybe some kidnappings are easier when cryptocurrencies exist, and that is definitely a downside to consider vs the already low upsides of crypto.

For a billionaire, that is quite a humble home.

I am a multimillionaire in Indian Rupees but that doesn’t mean much in dollars or euros.

Another poster pointed out they were worth $200 million or as the article said about 147 million pounds.

How long will it be until people realize cryptocurrency is a problem?

Yes, cryptocurrency is clearly to blame for kidnappings. It's not like we ever had kidnappings before Bitcoin.

Is that I said though? You think the existence of cryptocurrency plays no part in facilitating ransom demands?

Yeah, so does existence of any spoken and/or written language. Without them, you'd actually have to come to the person, and explain the demand with signs like in a game of charades.

Any tool is amoral. Can be used for good or bad.

You do realize that kidnappings happened before bitcoin, right?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com