An Israeli crypto entrepreneur was reportedly robbed of his digital assets at gunpoint in his Tel Aviv home two weeks ago, according to the Israeli financial site, Globes on Wednesday. The entrepreneur, whose identity has not been revealed, told police that robbers broke into his home, beat him mercilessly, and forced him to transfer all of his crypto holdings to their wallets.

Israeli Entrepreneur Robbed

However, the outlet said the transactions were frozen by the wallet provider after they became suspicious of transfers and conversions done with the wallet. As a result, neither the robbers nor the entrepreneur has access to the cryptocurrencies stored in the wallet.

According to Globes, the entrepreneur has now left Israel and remains nearly penniless.

Old School Robbers Are after Crypto

Cryptocurrencies are kept and held digitally. Unlike cash, there is no physical form of cryptocurrency that anyone can rob. These crypto wallets are encrypted, and only the unique private keys can access the stored cryptocurrencies.

However, digitally held cryptocurrencies are vulnerable. Cybercriminals have attacked numerous cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet providers, stealing hundreds of millions of dollars of crypto every year.

Crypto cyber thieves target individuals with phishing and other sophisticated tactics to steal their digital currency holdings. Earlier this week, the Wallingford Police Department in the US State of Connecticut said that a town resident was coerced towards paying the sum of $19,000 in Bitcoin by a scammer posing as a computer service representative. In another recent incident, a man from Iowa lost more than $232,000 in a cryptocurrency-romance scam.

However, cybercriminals are not the only ones after cryptocurrencies. Though incidents are rare, several robbers also tried to rob cryptocurrencies from people at gunpoint. In 2018, a cryptocurrency trader in England’s Oxfordshire reported to the authorities that four masked robbers had broken into his house and robbed all of his Bitcoin. In another armed robbery, a Russian crypto blogger lost $425,000 worth of bitcoin in the same year.

The intensity of the crimes increases significantly sometimes, as Pavel Lerner, a Managing Director of cryptocurrency exchange EXMO, was kidnapped in Ukraine’s Kyiv in December 2017 and was released after paying a ransom of $1 million in Bitcoin. Furthermore, another New Jersey man was kidnapped at gunpoint and was forced to give up the password of his crypto wallet that contained $1.8 million in Ether.