A cryptocurrency investor has been charged with kidnapping an Italian man for weeks, threatening and torturing him with a gun and a chainsaw, in a grisly bid to extort his bitcoin password, court documents and US media said.
In a plot like a bad Hollywood thriller, New York police on Sunday said that they arrested 37-year-old John Woeltz, a Kentucky man, on Friday last week in the Manhattan apartment he was renting.
Woeltz was charged on Saturday with kidnapping, assault and criminal possession of a gun, and pleaded not guilty, according to court documents.
Photo: AP
A second person, 24-year-old Beatrice Folchi, is also being held.
The police said the victim, a 28-year-old Italian whose name has not been released, managed to escape and ran up to a traffic agent with a horrific tale of having been held, bound and tortured for weeks before managing to escape from Woeltz’s townhouse.
The victim initially went to Woeltz’s apartment on May 6. The two are believed to have had some previous business connection.
Upon arrival, Woeltz and an unidentified accomplice, who has yet to be named or caught, seized the Italian’s passport and electronic devices, and demanded the access codes for his bitcoin accounts.
When he refused, the two men tied him up, struck him with a gun, pointed it at his face, menaced him with a chainsaw and even took him to the fifth floor of the building, threatening to throw him over the edge if he did not relent, documents said.
They also reportedly threatened to kill members of his family.
Several details of the story remain murky, including exactly why the victim had agreed to come to the townhouse in an upscale neighborhood and whether he revealed anything of use to the kidnappers.
More details are expected to come out at a court hearing scheduled for tomorrow.
The grisly tale emerged as the bitcoin cryptocurrency this week set a new record of US$109,856.
While cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin and ethereum are said to be highly secure, they have faced numerous cyberattacks seeking to exploit weak spots in exchange platforms. The FBI in February said that North Korean hackers stole a historic US$1.5 billion from the bybit platform.
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