Life imitates xkcd comics as Florida gang steals retiree’s crypto password

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

He had recently driven 11 hours on I-95 from his home in South Florida to Durham, North Carolina. It was a long way, but like many jobs, the occasional commute was the price of doing business. That was especially true when your company 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 25-year-old, had first tried this type of work closer to home, but it didn’t work out well. A September 2022 home invasion in Homestead, Florida, was supposed to net St. Felix and his crew mountains of cryptocurrency. All they had to do was put a gun to a poor guy’s head and force him to log into his online exchange, then transfer the money to accounts controlled by the thieves. A simple plan, which worked well until it turned out that the victim’s cryptocurrency accounts contained far less money than expected.

Rather than waste the opportunity, St. Felix improvised. Court records show 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 request to his friends and family to send cryptocurrency to secure the man’s release. Five of these videos were recorded in the car. The abducted man was eventually found by police 120 miles from his home.

A complicated operation.

St. Felix and his team then began looking for new jobs out of state. They stole $150,000 and two Rolex watches from someone in Little Elm, Texas, but their attention was eventually drawn to a tidy home on Wells Street in distant Durham. The owner of the home was supposedly a major cryptocurrency investor. (The team had hacked his email account to confirm this.)

After his April 11 surveillance, St. Felix and his partner, Elmer Castro, went to a local Walmart and purchased their work uniforms: sunglasses, a clipboard, reflective vests and khaki pants. Back at their hotel, St. Felix took a photo of himself in the outfit, which looked enough like a construction worker’s for his purposes.

The next morning, at 7:30 a.m., St. Felix and Castro went to the Wells Street house again. Instead of watching from the block, they knocked on the door. The husband answered. The men told him a story about necessary plumbing inspections. They wandered around the house for a few minutes, then knocked on the front door again.

But this time, when the woman answered, St. Felix and Castro were wearing balaclavas and sunglasses, and they had handguns. They forced their way inside. The woman screamed, and her husband came out of the kitchen to see them fighting. The intruders punched the husband in the face and tied both homeowners’ hands and feet with zip ties.

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

Meanwhile, St. Felix had taken the husband at gunpoint to an office in the back of the house. There, the threats came thick and fast: 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, which meant helping St. Felix log into the man’s Coinbase account.

St. Felix, holding a black pistol and wearing a Bass Pro Shop baseball cap, waited for the shocked husband’s approval. When he got it, he cut the man’s plastic ties and stood him in front of the iMac in the home office.

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

The real flight was about to begin.