She refused to give up her password and, according to prosecutors, was so demoralized by the previous theft of most of her funds that she told the men to simply shoot her. Instead, they stole her engagement ring, two iPhones, a laptop, the charger for the neurostimulator the other family member used as a treatment for Parkinson’s disease and all the cash they could find, then drove away.
For their next victim, prosecutors describe how the group targeted a man Seemungal knew to be a SIM-swapping hacker who they believed had, in fact, stolen a significant sum of cryptocurrency from him in 2021. To prepare for that robbery in September 2022, they began repeatedly sending pizza deliveries to their target in hopes of conditioning him to come to their doorstep unsuspecting. However, when the time came for the planned robbery, their target was not home, so they lay in wait and then pointed guns at their target when he arrived at the house.
For the next hour, the group tied their victim’s hands behind his back with boot laces and demanded that he hand over access to his crypto accounts. When the account he gave them access to only had a small amount of cryptocurrency, they put him in the back seat of their rented Cadillac, hit him in the face with their guns, drove off, and began extorting payments from his friends and father. with cryptocurrencies. Finally, about 120 miles from their victim’s home, the men pulled their victim out of the car and told him to kneel. Instead, he escaped, when one of the men fired a gun from the moving car, although it is unclear whether the shot was intended to wound the victim or simply scare him. One of the members of the group, who has not yet been charged, would later say that Saint Felix had suggested that they kill his captive.
A few months later, prosecutors write, the group carried out its next attack against another victim they believed to be a wealthy cryptocurrency-focused hacker, this time in Texas. On a road trip from Florida to begin surveillance of their target, St. Felix fled from police in Louisiana, flipped his car at more than 90 miles per hour and broke his leg. The other members of the Florida crew were arrested after that crash. So the robbery was carried out by a newly recruited team based in the Houston area.
Just days before Christmas 2022, the Texas group broke into their target’s home, tied his relatives’ hands with zip ties, and repeatedly punched him in the face, demanding that he give them access to his cryptocurrency. Prosecutors say they stuck knives and forks under her mother’s fingernails and hit her in the face with a gun. They burned his target’s arm with a hot iron to force him to hand over his crypto account details and at one point attempted to hit him on his genitals.
The victim eventually told his tormentors that he had buried a device that stored his cryptocurrency in the backyard. (In fact, that hardware wallet, which contained $1.4 million worth of cryptocurrency, was in a moving box in the house that the robbers never found.) When the robbers took their victim into the backyard to locate the device, he climbed a fence and escaped. The robbers stole $150,000 in cash and some jewelry and then drove off.
One last job
In early 2023, after those relatively unsuccessful extortion attempts, a Seemungal associate allegedly began providing leads to the group, hacking into the email of potential targets to see the size of their cryptocurrency holdings and sending those leads to the team. home invasion. A Telegram chat obtained by prosecutors shows a discussion about potential targets, including someone with $1.2 million in Texas and another person with $600,000 in Tennessee.
