Man abducted, murdered in $170,000 Bitcoin extortion in Ukraine

Police in Ukraine have arrested four men on allegations of abducting and killing a man for his Bitcoin. The 29-year-old Morrocan was beaten and dragged into a car near his home in Solomianskyi, a district in Kyiv. The assailants demanded the victim transfer the equivalent of $170,000 in BTC into their wallets before strangling him to death.

In a statement posted on Facebook on Monday, local police said the criminals buried the body in a forest. The incident, first reported by the Kyiv Independent newspaper, occurred around midnight but police did not say when. Neighbors heard screams outside and saw “several unknown” attackers beat up the man and reported the matter to law enforcement.

Ukraine gang ‘carefully planned the kidnapping’

“They [the assailants] carefully prepared a plan to kidnap the victim,” police said. “They learned that the man had bitcoins, worth several millions of hryvnias [Ukrainian money], and decided to own them.”

CCTV footage released by the police in the Ukrainian capital Kyiv, appears to show the moment that the victim was abducted.

The man, who is of Morrocan origin, was taken to an abandoned building in the city and forced to transfer Bitcoin valued at 7 million in Ukrainian currency (~$170,000) into the attackers’ crypto wallets.

A special police operation led to the arrest of four men aged between 24 and 29 years and the recovery of the stolen Bitcoin, which had been converted to cash. Police said the gang changed the number plates of the car used in committing the crime in an attempt to cover their tracks. The four men appeared in court on charges of murder, kidnapping and concealing a crime. They could all spend the rest of their lives in jail if found guilty.

This would not be the first time that criminals have abducted someone for BTC in Ukraine. In December 2017, kidnappers in the European country got a ransom worth over $1 million in Bitcoin in exchange for releasing Pavel Lerner, an employee of the British crypto platform Exmo Finance.

Lerner was abducted on Dec. 26 by six masked men with guns and bundled into a minibus using stolen numbers plates, Reuters reported. A ransom was paid in Bitcoin three days before his release.