She refused to give up her password and, prosecutors say, was demoralized after an earlier hack that had stolen most of her assets and told the men to shoot her, but they took her engagement ring, two iPhones, a laptop, a charger for a neurostimulator used by a family member to treat Parkinson’s disease, and what cash they could get their hands on and left.
As for their next victim, prosecutors describe how the group targeted a man they knew Seemungal to be a fellow SIM-swapping hacker and believed had in fact stolen a large amount of cryptocurrency from him in 2021. In preparation for the September 2022 robbery, they began sending repeated pizza deliveries to their target in an attempt to lure him into coming to their home without arousing suspicion. However, when the moment for the planned theft arrived, their target was not at home, so they instead ambushed him, pointing their guns at him when he arrived home.
For the next hour, the group tied the victim’s hands behind his back with shoelaces and demanded that he give up access to his cryptocurrency account. When the account he gave access to had only a small amount of cryptocurrency in it, they forced him into the backseat of a rented Cadillac, hit him in the face with a gun, drove off, and began extorting cryptocurrency payments from his friends and father. Finally, about 120 miles from the victim’s home, the men forced him out of the car and ordered him to kneel. However, he fled when one of the men fired a gun from the moving car, although it is unclear whether the shots were aimed at the victim or simply meant to intimidate him. One of the group members (who has not yet been charged) later said that St. Felix suggested they kill their captors.
A few months later, the group carried out a second attack, this time in Texas, against another victim they believed to be a wealthy hacker with cryptocurrency interests, according to prosecutors’ accounts. During a road trip from Florida to spy on a target, St. Felix fled from police in Louisiana, flipping his car at more than 90 mph and breaking his leg. Other members of the Florida group were arrested after the incident, so the intrusion was carried out by a newly recruited team based in the Houston area.
A few days before Christmas 2022, a group in Texas broke into a target’s home, bound a family member’s hands with zip ties and repeatedly punched him in the face as they demanded access to his cryptocurrency. According to prosecutors, they shoved a knife and fork between the mother’s fingernails and hit her in the face with a gun. They burned the target’s arm with a hot iron and at one point tried to hit him in the genitals in an attempt to force him to hand over cryptocurrency account details.
The victim eventually told his tormentors that he had buried the device in his backyard (in fact, the hardware wallet, which contained $1.4 million worth of cryptocurrency, was in moving boxes in the house, but the perpetrators never found it). When the perpetrators took the victim to the backyard to look for the device, the victim climbed over a fence and escaped. The perpetrators left with $150,000 in cash and jewelry.
Final Job
In early 2023, after those relatively unsuccessful extortion attempts, Seemangal’s associates allegedly tipped off the group, which began hacking into potential targets’ emails to find out their cryptocurrency holdings and sending that information to home invasion teams. One Telegram chat obtained by prosecutors shows discussions of potential targets, including someone in Texas with $1.2 million and another in Tennessee with $600,000.
