- A 23-year-old Venezuelan financial advisor has allegedly faked a kidnap in order to disappear with investors’ bitcoin
- Andrés Jesús Dos Santos Hernánde says that kidnappers forced him to empty the $1.15 million worth of bitcoin in his companies’ Binance account
- Police don’t believe him and are looking for him
A 23-year-old financial advisor is being hunted in Venezuela after seemingly faking a kidnap to disappear with over $1 million in investors’ bitcoin. Andrés Jesús Dos Santos Hernández has been accused by the Venezuelan equivalent of the FBI, the Cuerpo de Investigaciones Científicas Penales y Criminalísticas (CICPC), of making off with investors’ funds after faking the kidnap which supposedly involved him being forced to liquidate his Binance account.
Hernández Wanted for Money Laundering
Hernández’s picture was posted on Instagram by CICPC director Douglas Ricovzla, who reported that the 23-year-old was wanted for money laundering after running a scam which enticed people out of their bitcoin before faking the kidnap to make off with it.
The post says that Hernández accumulated the bitcoin from his victims and then simulated a kidnapping where “his captors allegedly forced him to enter the Binance platform and make transfers to different digital wallets, depleting all the crypto assets in question.”
Bitcoin Scammer Using Unique Excuse
Clearly the CICPC don’t believe Hernández’s claims about the kidnap and are on the hunt for him, which you would hope they would be doing anyway even if he had been kidnapped. His tale puts a nice spin on the traditional method of disappearing with other people’s money, which is to either just walk away with it or, as in the Africrypt case, claim that your site has been hacked and beg investors not to go to the police.
