Canadians have crypto stolen from their homes, police say

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According to local police, Canadian neighborhoods are in the throes of a wave of home invasion-style robberies seeking the private keys of wealthy crypto investors.

According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) website, a warning has been issued by Richmond and Delta police about the upward trend as several such robberies have taken place.

Investigations are still ongoing and police have not provided details regarding specific incidents or the amount of cryptocurrency that was stolen. Police have yet to determine if there is a connection between the individual incidents, although a discernible pattern is emerging between each, authorities said.

In each case, the suspects gain access to a victim’s home posing as delivery people or authority figures, the RCMP said. Once brought inside the house, the suspects steal information from the victims that gives access to their cryptocurrency accounts.

The physical nature of the theft contrasts sharply with the more common types of crypto crimes in the industry, such as online scams and ransomware attacks. These criminals typically exploit blockchain networks’ pseudonymity and irreversibility of transactions and typically do so remotely.

While hackers may be able to exploit a DeFi protocol to steal millions of crypto from its users, crypto funds are rarely physically seized. Indeed, crypto investors largely keep crypto funds either in custodial wallets (behind a password), non-custodial wallets (the kind that require users to memorize a 12-word seed phrase), or a hardware wallet that provides additional security.

But many hardware wallet providers encourage people to keep backup versions of their seed phrase on a piece of paper, giving thieves something to look for when breaking into someone’s home.

Ironically, police advice to worried crypto owners is to trust centralization: keep your valuables and financial information in a safe place, such as a safe at a financial institution, the RCMP wrote.

Earlier this month, a Bitcoin developer released a tool called BIP39Colors, allowing Bitcoin holders to disguise their seed phrase as a series of colors. This could theoretically allow investors to hide their crypto in a less obvious way, rather than as a clear list of words.

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