US court to decide fate of cryptocurrency robbers who planned to physically steal cryptocurrency

Police have arrested two robbers who planned to steal tens of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency — their fate will be decided by the US Federal District Court.

According to prosecutor Damian Williams, the attackers knew exactly which victims they would choose — it was a planned attack. The robbers, Dominic Pineda and Sean Morgan, wanted to break into the house at night and force its residents to reveal the key code to the wallet that held the bitcoin funds. Pineda and Morgan have already been charged with conspiracy to commit robbery. The maximum sentence if they are found guilty is 20 years in prison.

Interestingly, the robbers wanted to steal the virtual currency in a physical way: by planning, leaving traces, and eventually being caught by the police. Most criminals choose a more traditional method for stealing cryptocurrencies: hacking. For example, the Harmony blockchain team recently reported an attack on the Horizon cross-chain bridge, as a result of which hackers stole assets worth about $ 100 million (some of the funds were recovered, and some seem to remain with the attackers). However, some hackers also steal on a smaller scale, intercepting users' cryptocurrency transactions. Thus, the Clipminer virus was downloaded to a computer as a WinRAR archive and automatically unpacked to run the file. Its goal was to monitor the victim’s actions and withdraw cryptocurrencies as soon as hackers had the opportunity.