The victim got rescued by police officers without his family paying the ransom. The amount in bitcoin requested by the captors is equivalent to more than 350,000 dollars.
A kidnapping in Venezuela involved bitcoin among its protagonists. The cryptocurrency got requested as a means of payment for the ransom of a merchant kidnapped on January 17 in Lagunillas, Zulia state, in the extreme west of the Latin American country.
The director of the Scientific, Penal and Criminal Investigations Corps, Douglas Rico, highlighted the incident through his Instagram profile. There, Rico clarified that the relatives denounced the kidnapping of the merchant, whose identity was unknown. In this way, the police forces began an investigation to find the hostage.
The kidnappers requested at least ten BTC for the merchant’s release, around 354,000 dollars according to various calculators.
The director reported that the officers managed to free the victim in a wooded area of the Cabimas municipality. A confrontation with the captors was not a necessary point to set the merchant free but the investigations led them to combat and kill one of the criminals involved in the case.
According to Rico, the case got resolved without the victim’s relatives giving the BTC ransom requested by the kidnapper.
Kidnappings and Bitcoin in Venezuela: The New Crime
This kidnapping ended in good terms, unlike another case involving a bitcoin ransom demand last August. Also, in Zulia, another merchant got killed by his captors due to the non-payment of BTC by his family.
As reported by various media outlets at the time, the hijackers asked for at least 1.5 BTC ($66,500 to date). They then dropped to 0.5 bitcoins, but the victim’s family only managed to gather a total of 0.062 BTC, less than $3,000 worth of the cryptocurrency based on current prices.
On the other hand, a 23-year-old Venezuelan man got investigated by the police for extracting at least 23.66 bitcoin (BTC). Andrés Jesús Dos Santos Hernández is the accused’s name, a financial operator who got denounced for defrauding his clients by making them believe that their funds got stolen.
Specifically, the scammer planned to simulate his kidnapping. According to the scammer, his captors would have forced him to enter the Binance cryptocurrency exchange and transfer all the assets deposited there to other wallets.
The information on the search for Dos Santos Hernández got also revealed by Douglas Rico, director of the Corps of Scientific, Criminal and Criminal Investigations (CICPC,) in a post made in his Instagram account. Likewise, the fact was a popular report in various Venezuelan media. “Money laundering and fraud” is how Rico described the crime in his post.
Jenson Nuñez
