A Canadian police department has issued a public warning of a possible trend where high-value cryptocurrency investors are being robbed in their own homes.
On July 19, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in Richmond, a city south of Vancouver, said several similar robberies involving cryptocurrency investors have occurred over the last 12 months.
Staff Sergeant Gene Hsieh of the Richmond RCMP Major Crime Unit said someone is “targeting these victims for cryptocurrency” and believed a public warning was necessary for public safety.
Richmond RCMP and Delta Police
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Police issue warning to high-value cryptocurrency investors following home-invasion style robberies.
— Delta Police Department (@deltapolice) July 19, 2023
The RCMP didn’t release specific details on the incidents but explained in each case the perpetrator impersonated a delivery driver before robbing the victim.
“The suspects gain access to a victim’s home by posing as delivery people or persons of authority. Once let inside the home, the suspects rob the victims of information that gives access to their cryptocurrency accounts.”
Staff Sergeant Jill Long of the Delta Police Investigative Services said the suspects appear to know that the victims are “heavily” invested in cryptocurrency along with knowledge of where they live.
The police department confirmed it made one arrest but has not confirmed whether several incidents are linked. It did not provide specific details about the incidents or how much cryptocurrency was stolen as the investigations are still ongoing.
To avoid a home robbery the department advised not letting strangers or delivery people — whether seemingly legitimate or not — into the household and instead ask them to leave deliveries outside.
If in doubt, a call should be made to the delivery company to confirm the person’s identity and authorities should be called if danger is or appears imminent.
Valuables and financial information should be kept somewhere safe within the household, such as a safety box, the police advised.
More generally the police recommend only discussing financial matters in private — not on social media — and only with trusted people.
In March, Canada’s self-proclaimed “Crypto King” — Aiden Pleterski — was allegedly kidnapped, falsely imprisoned and assaulted by five men who fell for an apparent cryptocurrency scheme from Pleterski.
One of the men, who reportedly invested 740,000 Canadian dollars ($560,000) into the scheme, was charged with kidnapping Pleterski on July 17, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Collect this article as an NFT to preserve this moment in history and show your support for independent journalism in the crypto space.
The Archbishop of York has told Sky News the UK should resist Reform’s “kneejerk” plan for the mass deportation of migrants, telling Nigel Farage he is not offering any “long-term solution”.
Stephen Cottrell said in an interview with Trevor Phillips he has “every sympathy” with people who are concerned about asylum seekers coming to the country illegally.
But he criticised the plan announced by Reform on Tuesday to deport 600,000 people, which would be enabled by striking deals with the Taliban and Iran, saying it will not “solve the problem”.
Mr Cottrell is currently acting head of the Church of England while a new Archbishop of Canterbury is chosen.
Image: Pic: Jacob King/PA Wire
Image: The Archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell in 2020.
File pic: PA
Phillips asked him: “What’s your response to the people who are saying the policy should be ‘you land here, unlawfully, you get locked up and you get deported straight away. No ifs, no buts’?”
Mr Cottrell said he would tell them “you haven’t solved the problem”, adding: “You’ve just put it somewhere else and you’ve done nothing to address the issue of what brings people to this country.
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“And so if you think that’s the answer, you will discover in due course that all you have done is made the problem worse.
“Don’t misunderstand me, I have every sympathy with those who find this difficult, every sympathy – as I do with those living in poverty.
“But… we should actively resist the kind of isolationist, short term kneejerk ‘send them home’.”
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2:04
What do public make of Reform’s plans?
Image: Nigel Farage at the launch of Reform UK’s plan to deport asylum seekers. Pic: PA
Asked if that was his message to the Reform leader, he said: “Well, it is. I mean, Mr Farage is saying the things he’s saying, but he is not offering any long-term solution to the big issues which are convulsing our world, which lead to this. And, I see no other way.”
Mr Farage, the MP for Clacton, was asked at a news conference this week what he would say if Christian leaders opposed his plan.
“Whoever the Christian leaders are at any given point in time, I think over the last decades, quite a few of them have been rather out of touch, perhaps with their own flock,” he said.
“We believe that what we’re offering is right and proper, and we believe for a political party that was founded around the slogan of family, community, country that we are doing right by all of those things, with these plans we put forward today.”
Sky News has approached Mr Farage for comment.
Farage won’t be greeting this as good news of the gospel – nor will govt ministers
When Tony Blair’s spin doctor Alastair Campbell told journalists that “We don’t do God”, many took it as a statement of ideology.
In fact it was the caution of a canny operator who knows that the most dangerous opponent in politics is a religious leader licensed to challenge your very morality.
Stephen Cottrell, the Archbishop of York, currently the effective head of the worldwide Anglican communion, could not have been clearer in his denunciation of what he calls the Reform party’s “isolationist, short term, kneejerk ‘send them home'” approach to asylum and immigration.
I sense that having ruled himself out of the race for next Archbishop of Canterbury, Reverend Cottrell feels free to preach a liberal doctrine.
Unusually, in our interview he pinpoints a political leader as, in effect, failing to demonstrate Christian charity.
Nigel Farage, who describes himself as a practising Christian, won’t be greeting this as the good news of the gospel.
But government ministers will also be feeling nervous.
Battered for allowing record numbers of cross- Channel migrants, and facing legal battles on asylum hotels that may go all the way to the Supreme Court, Labour has tried to head off the Reform challenge with tougher language on border control.
The last thing the prime minister needs right now is to make an enemy of the Almighty – or at least of his representatives on Earth.