The Department of Justice busted a group of more than a dozen people, led by a 24-year-old man named Remy St. Felix, who perpetrated a string of break-ins and violent assaults in hopes of obtaining their victims' cryptocurrency holdings. The group seems to have been far more successful with their hacking thefts than with their in-person attempts to obtain cryptocurrency, but that didn't stop them from committing a string of eleven break-ins where they assaulted, threatened, and kidnapped victims.

In one case, a victim was able to transfer $150,000 in cryptocurrency to the attackers before their cryptocurrency exchange blocked the suspicious transfers. However, in their other attempts to physically steal crypto, they were unsuccessful, with victims either refusing to hand over their crypto or successfully escaping.

In one case, St. Felix and his associates targeted a woman from whom his group had already stolen $3 million in a SIM swapping attack. When they broke in and held the woman at gunpoint to try to steal the $500,000 in crypto she had left, the woman refused to turn over her password to her cryptocurrency account, so dismayed by her earlier loss that she told the men just to shoot her.

St. Felix was convicted on nine counts by a federal jury, and faces a sentence of seven years to life in prison. Thirteen co-conspirators also pleaded guilty.

• "Man Convicted of Violent Home Invasion Robberies to Steal Cryptocurrency" , U.S. Department of Justice
• "Inside a Violent Gang's Ruthless Crypto-Stealing Home Invasion Spree" , Wired