Life imitates xkcd comic as Florida gang beats crypto password from retiree

Remy Ra St. Felix spent April 11, 2023, on a quiet street in a rented BMW X5, staking out the 76-year-old couple that he planned to rob the next day.

He had recently made the 11-hour drive up I-95 from southern Florida, where he lived, to Durham, North Carolina. It was a long way, but as with so many jobs, occasional travel was the cost of doing business. That was true especially when your business was robbing people of their cryptocurrency by breaking into their homes and threatening to cut off their balls and rape their wives.

St. Felix, a young man of just 25, had tried this line of work closer to home at first, but it hadn't gone well. A September 2022 home invasion in Homestead, Florida, was supposed to bring St. Felix and his crew piles of crypto. All they had to do was stick a gun to some poor schlub's head and force him to log in to his online exchange and then transfer the money to accounts controlled by the thieves. A simple plan—which worked fine until it turned out that the victim's crypto accounts had far less money in them than planned.

Rather than waste the opportunity, St. Felix improvised. Court records showed that he tied the victim's hands, shoved him into a vehicle, and drove away. Inside the car, the kidnappers filmed themselves beating the victim, who was visibly bleeding from the mouth and face. A gun was placed to the victim's neck, and he was forced to record a plea for friends and family to send cryptocurrency to secure the man's release. Five such videos were recorded in the car. The abducted man was eventually found by police 120 miles from his home.

A messy operation.

So St. Felix and his crew began to look out of state for new jobs. They robbed someone in Little Elm, Texas, of $150,000 and two Rolex watches, but their attention was eventually drawn to a tidy home on Wells Street in far-off Durham. The homeowner there was believed to be a significant crypto investor. (The crew had hacked into his email account to confirm this.)

After his day of surveillance on April 11, St. Felix and his partner, Elmer Castro, drove to a local Walmart and purchased their work uniforms: sunglasses, a clipboard, reflective vests, and khaki pants. Back at their hotel, St. Felix snapped a photo of himself in this getup, which looked close enough to a construction worker for his purposes.

The next morning at 7:30 am, St. Felix and Castro rolled up to the Wells Street home once more. Instead of surveilling it from down the block, they knocked on the door. The husband answered. The men told him some story involving necessary pipe inspections. They wandered around the home for a few minutes, then knocked on the front door again.

But this time, when the wife answered, St. Felix and Castro were wearing ski masks and sunglasses—and they had handguns. They pushed their way inside. The woman screamed, and her husband came in from the kitchen to see them all fighting. The intruders punched the husband in the face and zip-tied the hands and feet of both homeowners.

Castro dragged the wife by her legs down the hallway and into the bathroom. He stood guard over her, wielding his distinctive pink revolver.

In the meantime, St. Felix had marched the husband at gunpoint into a loft office at the back of the home. There, the threats came quickly—St. Felix would cut off the man's toes, he said, or his genitals. He would shoot him. He would rape his wife. The only way out was to cooperate, and that meant helping St. Felix log in to the man's Coinbase account.

St. Felix, holding a black handgun and wearing a Bass Pro Shop baseball cap, waited for the shocked husband's agreement. When he got it, he cut the man's zip-ties and set him in front of the home office iMac.

The husband logged in to the computer, and St. Felix took over and downloaded the remote-control software AnyDesk. He then opened up a Telegram audio call to the real brains of the operation.

The actual robbery was about to begin.

From SIM-swapping to zip-tying

A famous xkcd cartoon depicts two (evil) stick figures arguing about how to break into an encrypted laptop. In the first panel, labeled "A Crypto Nerd's Imagination," the duo are thwarted by the "4096-bit RSA" security of the target's laptop. "Blast! Our evil plan is foiled!" says one of them. They give up.

In the second panel, labeled "What Would Actually Happen," the two thieves respond to the laptop in a very different way—they plan to drug the owner and "hit him with this $5 wrench until he tells us the password."

In other words, cryptographic security offers protection from various hacking threats, but it's not nearly so powerful when a pair of thugs show up at your front door and press a handgun to your neck.

This was essentially the business model of St. Felix and his crew, but their violence was a recent evolution. Jarod Seemungal, a 23-year-old from West Palm Beach, Florida, had originally partnered with several foreign co-conspirators to drain people's cryptocurrency accounts through hands-off hacks. From 2020 until 2022, this group saw some success with "SIM-swapping attacks," in which Seemungal gained access to the victims' phone numbers in order to intercept two-factor authentication codes sent from crypto exchanges. This made it far easier to break into their crypto accounts and simply transfer the money elsewhere.

The pink handgun used by one of the men during the Durham robbery.

But in 2022, for reasons unclear, the group decided that just breaking into the homes of wealthy crypto owners might somehow be a better business model. They recruited St. Felix, who became the leader of the home-invasion crew, but Seemungal and his foreign associates kept control over the actual funds-transfer process. Between the SIM-swapping attacks and the physical break-ins, the crew had stolen more than $3.5 million from various victims.

Inside the Durham home, St. Felix and his victim watched as Seemungal took remote control of the man's computer through AnyDesk and then accessed his Coinbase account. Whenever a two-factor authentication code was needed, St. Felix would read it off the victims' phones to Seemungal.

Over the next few minutes, Seemungal converted various crypto "coins" in the account into the more-common bitcoin and ether. He then made three successful transfers out of the victim's Coinbase account, totaling $156,853. Coinbase blocked a fourth transfer.

It was now nearly 9 am, and the neighborhood was coming alive with landscaping crews. St. Felix and Castro were impatient to be gone. St. Felix took the husband down to the bathroom and left him there with his wife. The thieves broke the iMac and the couple's phones—and then left the house and drove off in their SUV.

The husband and wife made their way out of the house minutes later and contacted neighbors. By 9:17 am, the police had arrived—but the crypto was gone.

A long stretch inside

St. Felix and his crew don't appear to have understood digital security. Castro opened his own Coinbase account, using a government ID, at 11:42 am on the day of the home invasion in Durham. St. Felix opened his account at 5:04 pm that evening. Each man received a transfer of $22,267.65 for their role in the robbery, leaving $112,000 to be split among the ringleaders, who had never left their keyboards.

Although the robbery money had been laundered through what the government describes as "anonymity-enhanced cryptocurrencies, as well as 'instant exchanges' and decentralized finance platforms that did not conduct know-your-customer checks," federal investigators were still able to follow its flow, which led directly to the perpetrators. (As did cell phone records; the men had taken their own phones with them during the robbery.)

Within a few months, the whole crew—apart from the mysterious foreign co-conspirators, had been rounded up. St. Felix himself was arrested in a McDonald's parking lot in West Hempstead, New York, on the morning of July 27, 2023. He was allegedly on the way to commit another home invasion against a family of five out on Long Island; zip-ties, a handgun, and an "AR-style rifle" were found in his vehicle.

Several of the men involved pled guilty, including Seemungal and Castro. Seemungal was sentenced to 20 years in prison and $4 million in restitution payments, while Castro will be sentenced in a few weeks. Most other members of the crew pled guilty and have been sentenced to anywhere between 12 and 25 years in prison.

St. Felix, however, took his case all the way to trial, which was held in Greensboro, North Carolina, and lasted for six days. On June 25, St. Felix was convicted by a jury of his peers. And on September 11, he was at last sentenced to 47 years in prison.

The government highlighted its success at breaking up the violent gang, but the disturbing fact remains that it was easy to recruit people who were willing to drive all over the country with guns, break into people's houses, tie up and beat families, risking many years in prison for each home invasion—all just to earn $22,000 a pop. This would seem to be the very opposite of "low risk, high reward." Unfortunately, we live in a world where even over-the-top xkcd cartoons... aren't really over the top.