Man Fakes His Own Kidnapping to Steal $1,150,000 Worth of Bitcoin

Venezuela's largest national police agency is looking for a 23-year-old man who allegedly staged his own kidnapping in order to steal $1.15 million worth of Bitcoin.

According to the authorities, Andrés Jesús Dos Santos Hernández told his victims that their funds had been stolen.

He came up with a sham story about his captors forcing him to transfer his holdings from Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, to numerous wallet addresses. This, of course, was just a charade for his fraud.

So far, the scammer’s whereabouts remain unknown.

Earlier this month, Venezuelan merchant Gustavo Torres González got killed after his family members didn’t manage to pay the 0.5 BTC ransom that the victim’s kidnappers were demanding.

In late 2017, an executive of the Exmo cryptocurrency exchange got kidnapped in Ukraine but was later released after paying a $1 million ransom.