In August, six men are accused of robbing a couple in Connecticut while they were house hunting while they were driving a Lamborghini Urus.
A month later, federal officials in Washington, D.C., said they had arrested two men for planning to steal and wash more than $230 million in cryptocurrency.
As it turns out, the two events are connected.
In Danbury, Connecticut, just before 6 p.m. on August 25, several people called the police to report seeing six men in dark clothes force a couple into the back of a white van after hitting their Lamborghini from behind.
The van was quickly chased by police, and it crashed about a mile later. The suspects got out and ran away, but not long after, four of them were caught by police.
The couple was in the back of the van with duct tape around their arms and legs when police arrived and freed them.
The male victim had a concussion after being hit in the head with a bat and punched, according to an arrest document filed in U.S. District Court in Connecticut.
The people who were hurt said they were driving when a Honda Civic hit them from behind and then a van cut them off. Police say that the suspects got out of the car, “forcibly removed,” and pushed the man and woman inside. From what the statement says, they beat up the man who tried to escape.
The couple quickly heard sirens as the suspects drove off. One of the suspects is said to have yelled, “We are in deep sā!” and told the driver to speed up.
The four suspects in the van were arrested first, and then the other two guys were found at a rented house in Roxbury. The police also found the stolen car and the victim’s female Coach wallet.
Angel Borrero, 23, Josue Alberto Romero, 26, Reynaldo Diaz, 20, Anthony Pena, 23, Michael Rivas, 18, and Ricardo Estrada, 21 are the suspects. They are all from Florida. They are being charged in both federal and state courts with kidnapping, carjacking, and plotting.
According to the lawsuit, investigators later found that Borrero was the leader because he planned the heinous crime and paid for all six suspects to fly from Florida to New York.
Police found a group chat between the seven suspects that showed they planned to do more crimes.
Borrero is said to have written his friends, “If this good, we are going to Cali next.” He also had a lot of faith in them, telling them, “To be honest, this group is perfect for this.”
Detectives also found video footage that reportedly showed the men watching the couple outside of their home before they left to look for a house.
On September 19, the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., said that 20-year-old Malone Lam of Miami and Los Angeles and 21-year-old Jeandiel Serrano, also of Los Angeles, had been charged with conspiracy to steal and hide more than $230 million in cryptocurrency from a victim.
Federal authorities say Lam, Serrano, and other people who have not been named started stealing the cryptocurrency in August and laundering it through different exchanges.
“The conspirators would fraudulently get into the cryptocurrency accounts of victims and then take the money from those accounts,” prosecutors wrote.
“They cleaned the money by using “peel chains,” pass-through wallets, and virtual private networks (VPNs) to hide their real identities as they moved the money through different exchanges and mixers.”
Lam and Serrano are said to have bought jewelry, designer handbags, foreign plane tickets, and memberships to nightclubs.
Police in Danbury, Det. Sgt. Steven Castrovinci told the News-Times that the couple was targeted because their son was thought to be involved in the crypto plan. Castrovinci said that their son has been the target of “swatting calls” because of his “gaming.”
He said, “At the time of the kidnapping, we did not know the son was involved, but we thought he might have been because of previous calls to the police.”
Police wanted to talk to the son, but the FBI allegedly told them not to.
The man said, “The FBI called us and said they are looking into our son in connection with a cryptocurrency theft that happened.”
“That is how we knew, but even then, we were not sure how involved he was.” It was all we knew that he was being looked into for a crypto heist.
The police did not say if the son was Lam, Serrano, or one of the other attackers.
Castrovinci did not know how the guys who stole the car and kidnapped the son knew about it, but he told the News-Times that it was a “safe bet” that they planned to hold the parents as ransom.
“Other police departments have contacted us about the suspects,” he is said to have said. “Enquiries into these kids are still going on all over the south and maybe even the west.”
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