Crypto aside, quite surprising to see home invasions, kidnapping, and torture in middle class american neighborhoods.
What I'd like to know, which wasn't in the release is how did the criminals identify or decide to target these specific victims.
> An elderly North Carolina couple was held hostage in their home by armed men who threatened to "cut off (the) husband’s toes and genitalia, to shoot him, and to rape his wife," before they were robbed of more than $156,000 in cryptocurrency, federal prosecutors said.
[1] https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/news/crime/2018/08/22/up... [2] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/crime-courts/elderly-nc-couple-...
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/us/bay-area-thieves-seeki...
> DREW: I don’t even know if you’re gonna believe me whenever I tell you this, but there was an exploit in Coinbase for about one month where you could check the balance of any valid password and username. You could – no matter what. You didn’t need to have any sort of access except username and password. So, you didn’t need to SIM them to see their balance. So, people just ran millions upon millions of combos, combo list through Coinbase, and just found the millionaires of Coinbase. There’s obviously millions of those.
But the kidnapping and torture, yea that's pretty rare as far as I know.
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...
https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crim...
That includes all robberies, and home invasion would similarly be a subset of that, so the OP is off at least of by a factor of 10.
I'm using Bureau of Justice Statistics data, not FBI. E.g. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/victimization-durin...
FBI / UCR covers only reported crimes at police agencies that forward data, and is a subset. BJS tend to be better at getting realistic numbers. (E.g. a majority of burglaries aren't reported to the police, and thus don't show up in UCR*)
Also robbery is not a superset of home invasion, due to the difference in definition from burglary. Burglary isn't actually about stealing stuff, it's just breaking in with the intent to commit some crime (which is often theft, but not always). Robbery implies theft, but doesn't require it to be in someone's abode. So there's some overlap, but there's robberies that aren't burglaries (because no breaking in is involved), and there's burglaries (even some of the <10% subset of burglaries that are violent) that aren't robberies, because a theft isn't occurring.
* For things like homicide, UCR tends to be a lot better, because the reporting rate is quite high.
1. You break into someone's house and steal their crypto with no violence: burglary, not robbery.
1a. If they're present in the house, it's technically a home invasion even if there's no violence.
2. You break into someone's house and steal their crypto by physical violence: burglary and robbery
3. You break into someone's house and take a dump on their pillow: burglary (even though no theft), not robbery
4. You steal someone's crypto via violence on the street: robbery, not burglary
5. You steal someone's crypto by pickpocketing them on the street: not burglary, also not robbery
They used SIM swapping, which is done by fooling customer service agents using stolen, partial personal information. The victims were also cryptobros, so I am guessing the answer is actually as mundane as it gets: Victims put up their names and addresses on social media and bragged/discussed about their cryptowealth.
Either way it's irrelevant, the criminals got a hold of their personal information somehow and the most likely cause in this day and age is the victims divulging it themselves.