Victims were attacked with baseball bats over cryptocurrency profits.

Last month, Hong Kong authorities arrested three teenagers and successfully rescued a 19-year-old victim who had a horrific experience of being assaulted and illegally detained.

Police are actively seeking six additional individuals suspected of involvement, including four men and two women.

Hong Kong teen attacked over cryptocurrency profits

According to the South China Morning Post, the victim was lured under the guise of meeting people and trading crypto assets. However, when he arrived at a room at the Harbour Grand Kowloon Hotel on Tak Fung Street, the suspect demanded that he hand over HK$180,000 (about $23,000) in cryptocurrency trading profits.

Two of the nine suspects then threatened and beat the victim with baseball bats.

The 19-year-old victim managed to call for help from a friend, who then notified law enforcement. Six suspects connected to the case fled the scene, but police arrested two of them outside the hotel. Another was detained inside the hotel.

An insider was quoted as saying:

“The victim was allegedly detained when he went there to meet nine suspects (seven men and two women). The gang demanded that he pay HK$180,000 in profits from virtual currency trading.”

The arrested suspects are aged between 16 and 19 and face charges including assault, false imprisonment and blackmail, according to detectives from the Kowloon City Anti-Triad Unit in charge of the case.

Over the past three years, Hong Kong authorities have witnessed a significant rise in digital asset-related crimes in Hong Kong. The number of reported cases increased from 1,397 to 3,415, and the amount involved increased from HK$824 million to HK$4.398 billion, indicating an almost threefold increase in incidents during the same period.

Cryptocurrency crime wave

Cryptocurrency crime has also wreaked havoc around the world. In May last year, six people in Maharashtra, India, faced charges for allegedly kidnapping, torturing and extorting a man who failed to provide a return on his investment. The victim claimed that the defendants forcibly arranged a sale deed for his apartment to recover the funds and transfer his property to their names.

In South Korea, a former spy turned hitman, Lee Kyung-woo, was sentenced to life in prison in October for a kidnapping case involving a cryptocurrency dispute in which he abducted a woman from an upscale Seoul neighborhood and then injected her with a lethal dose of anesthetic obtained from a plastic surgery hospital.

The couple, who lost at least 1 billion won (about $760,000) in cryptocurrency investments, hired Lee, who allegedly posed as a former undercover agent, to eliminate the woman who encouraged them to invest and steal her digital assets.

In another shocking case, a 23-year-old cryptocurrency miner was kidnapped outside his home in Izhevsk, Russia, on Christmas Day. The kidnappers took him to an undisclosed location and contacted his brother via Telegram, demanding a ransom of more than 15 million rubles. The kidnappers also threatened to frame the victim for drug possession and hand him over to the authorities if their demands were not met. #香港  #加密犯罪