In India, Five men have been arrested for allegedly torturing the head of a failed $62.5 million Bitcoin investment scheme to death. This is according to Yahoo News.
The report says that the Dehradun police in Uttarakhand were alerted to the incident after a local hospital found the body of the deceased in a car abandoned in a parking lot.
Identity documents revealed that the victim was Abdul Shakoor, 35, from Malappuram in Kerala. Hospital authorities told police that a group of four men had brought the body to the car and fled the scene.
Marks on the body shows that Shakoor had been tortured to death. Arun Mohan Joshi, Dehradun Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP) disclosed the details of the police investigation which established that Shakoor had been running a Bitcoin (BTC) investment scheme in Kerala prior to his murder.
He reportedly oversaw a network of teams that collected money from investors across various regions — to the tune of 450 crore rupees ($62 million).
As the business failed, Shakoor fled Kerala with four members of his team. He is reported to have told one of them that his Bitcoin account had allegedly been hacked and that he envisioned launching his own cryptocurrency in order to pay back investors.
His confidant who was unconvinced suspected that Shakoor still had access to cryptocurrency worth crores of rupees and contacted his colleagues to plan how to extort Shakoor’s password to retrieve the funds.
On August 12, Shakoor’s confidant took him to Dehdradun and August 26th, he and the four other suspects rented a house, where they proceeded to torture Shakoor to force him to disclose the password.
According to the Local police,
“The accused tortured him so much to retrieve the password that Shakoor died. Because crores of money would be lost with his death, the men took him to a hospital, hoping for a miracle. However, since that hospital declared him dead, they took him to another hospital, where they received the same response. So, they abandoned the body in the car and fled the hospital.”