It's time for our True Crime Tuesday. The story is true, sounds true? No, it sounds made up. I don't know. Garry and Shannon present True Crime.
There is a really weird world that exists that you and I probably don't know very much about. And it's those people in the very high echelons in the world of crypto. And as difficult as it is for a lot of people to just simply understand what crypto trading is, how anybody can make money at it, how it has survived as long as it has, this is going to add a tiny bit of probably fear to that keeping
people away from crypto. The Wall Street Journal published a story about the ransom that exists, ransom cases that exist in cryptocurrency, and that there have been greater and greater incursions of safety, I guess, threats to safety in that very elite crypto world. Three men in black masks jump a thirty four year old woman in Paris. Her father runs Paymium, which is a cryptocurrency exchange based in France.
They had canisters, a mace, they had a gun. They tried to force this woman and her baby into an idling van disguised as a delivery truck. Her husband was there was able to throw himself between his family and the attackers. A neighbor was able to grab the child and get it to safety. The other neighbors were closing in. Shopkeeper shows up to throw a fire extinguisher. The kidnappers I should say would be kidnappers, jump into their van
and they speed off. The latest in a wave of violent criminal attacks and potential abductions around the world, including some here in the United States, that target these crypto executives and sometimes their families.
Like this one.
Victims have been pistol whipped, some of them have been kidnapped. In at least two cases, their fingers have been severed.
Again. It sounds like this is going to be a movie.
The goal is to get millions of dollars in ransom in cryptocurrency. These are sometimes called wrench attacks like the Tool simply because they rely on very simple tools for inflicting pain to coerce their victims, very old school mafia sound to it. Hacking used to be the biggest risk. I mean, it's still a big risk for crypto people. But to thwart those hackers, cryptocurrency investors take their digital
wallets offline in favor of a physical device. It makes some more Making it remote and offline makes it harder for somebody to steal simply by hacking into it, so real world crypto crime is what bypasses those safeguards. A bitcoin security company called Kasa, the co founder says, a lot of people are getting to the hide your gold under the mattress level of security. But if you're a high profile person, that's when you have to worry about the physical attack.
A cryptocurrency exchange.
Just this week, Coinbase disclosed that as many as ninety seven thousand people had their personal information stolen, including addresses. The company said it was likely stolen by bribed contractors or employees that worked in their customer support, and that it had refused a twenty million dollar ransom demand. We've
seen that with you know, hospitals, municipalities, et cetera. Somebody will hack into a system and basically hold it hostage until the hospital or police department or municipality whatever pays the ransom of free up that computer system. Cryptocurrency has also surged over the course of the last year. Bitcoin alone. Bitcoin is up fifty four percent in the last year, so there are people making millions of dollars on all
of this. At least five crypto related abductions have taken place in France in just the last few months, dozens of others around the world in the last year. For example, in Australia, a crypto billionaire was almost kidnapped whilst vacationing in Estonia. He was able to fight off the attackers posing as painters. In March, a crypto influencer out of Houston was assaulted before her husband got into a shootout with the bad guys who invaded their home in the
middle of the night demanding her laptop. Some of the assaults have been clumsy, some of them messy. But the problem is there are now organized crime rings that are seeing this as a major profit potential, and once you get a little bit more sophistication behind some of these abduction attacks, you're going to see people go away for
a long time, and I mean disappear. In September, there was a Floorida man who was sentenced to forty seven years in prison because he led a crime ring that carried out a string of home invasion across home invasion robberies in multiple states. In search specifically of crypto. In one of the attacks, he held a gun to the head of a guy in Durham, North Carolina, threatened to
cut off his his junk. The victim eventually was able to transfer one hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of crypto to The guy was later ordered to pay more than five hundred thousand dollars in restitution to his victims as part of his sentencing. Just last week, the Interior Minister in France gathered a bunch of crypto companies for a meeting to try to present new security measures for
that sector. They said the attack that attempted kidnapping from last week appeared similar to other recent abductions in France, in which they said these ringleaders are recruiting a bunch of young criminals they never meet, using apps like Telegram and Signal, and then remotely controlling them to execute their plan. Again, the French Interior Ministry says that these are probably linked.
At least some of these, like I said, have been successful in terms of the abductions, and definitely the physical assaults have been successful, with some people losing their fingers over this whole crypto thing. We're in the midst of True Crime Tuesday and talking about some of the craziest true crime stories that we've seen over the last couple of years, and I got to tell you this is one of them. The story behind Fred and Rose West a British horror story.
I said it was a book.
I meant to say that it was actually a Netflix documentary that has come out and it's a series. And I will say now, based on the story, it is not for public consumption, or at least not a general family watching.
Shall we say?
This documentary ends with a judge sentencing Rose West to life in prison. She was married to Fred West, and back in nineteen sixty nine. Fred was twenty seven years old, Rose was only fifteen. The power dynamic in that gives you an idea of how this relationship started. He controlled every aspect of her life and he pimped her out. Okay, that's not setting a great table for the relationship going forward.
They had several kids together, at least ten, and the whole thing starts with I mentioned that the documentary ends with her being sentenced to life in prison. It starts with police discovering the remains of one of their daughters in their home, there was this kind of weird and uncomfortable.
Everybody thought it was a joke at the time that would go between several of the children, which was, if you misbehave, you'll end up under the patio like Heather, and friends of theirs heard the kids say that joke to each other and never thought anything about it because they didn't know there was a Heather until her body
was found, Like I said, under the patio. She had been missing since nineteen eighty seven, and in the years after she disappeared, the stories about where she ended up changed. Parents would tell the different stories. It was February of ninety four that her remains were found underneath the patio of the rear garden of their home. Fred was arrested. Fred admitted that he killed the daughter in interviews with police there in Gloucester, but that was one of the
last vast murders that he committed. Fred was accused of starting way back in nineteen sixty seven, killing at least twelve young women. And remember that was about the time that he was starting to get this relationship with Rose. He was again killing a dozen women. Rose was convicted of ten of the murders. The date back to the early seventies. The documentary reveals also the story of Alison Chambers,
who had run away from home. In the series, her sister Desra reads a letter from nineteen seventy nine that her mother received from Alison, saying that she was going to be living with this great new couple, Fred and Rose and looking after their children, acting sort of as a nanny. A few months later, she goes missing and her remains are found at the house there in Gloucester. The series does not actually center on the living kids because a lot of them are not on speaking terms
with each other today. There's a lot of blame that goes back and forth between them. The eldest son, a guy named Steven, says, I don't speak to my siblings. There are no large, happy family get togethers. Too much has gone on. It's probably too painful for us. Phil Davis, is the husband of an older sister, explained every few years the cases back in the media, like now with
this new documentary, the public public gets interested again. But it's the kids who live with the pain of what happened on a daily basis, and in the series it's the relatives of the family. It's that second concentric circle
who gets the last word. Brelinda Mott, whose sister Juanita remains were found in the cellar of the West House, is seen visiting the sister's tombstone and she says, this is why I say to my children every single time I say good night or goodbye, I always say I love you, because you never know when it's the last time. Desra said, talking about her sister Allison, the one that
was a nanny, said it's cathartic. She's gotten so used to compartmentalizing all of this, she says, I've never really worked through it, so it was a help to her to take part in the documentary and it's filmmaking, so again, just an awful true crime story that's going to be this Netflix. Fred and Rose West a British horror story.