The $245M Bitcoin heist that ended in a kidnapping plot
In August 2024, three men in their late teens and early twenties cold-called a Washington, D.C. resident pretending to be Google technical support and tricked him into handing over the credentials that controlled forty-one hundred Bitcoin worth two hundred and forty-five million dollars. Within weeks they had spent millions on Lamborghinis, designer clothing, and Miami mansions.
The story turned violent when other criminals noticed. Adam Iza, a twenty-five-year-old crypto figure who called himself "The Godfather," learned which thieves had received what portion of the stolen funds and conspired with an accomplice to kidnap the parents of one of them, Veer Chetal, to extort his share. The Chetals were rear-ended on a Connecticut highway while driving their newly-purchased Lamborghini SUV, then surrounded by a white van whose occupants beat the father with a bat, dragged the mother by her hair, and bound both in duct tape before driving them away. Police intercepted the van before the ransom transfer completed, and arrests across multiple states followed within months.
The heist itself was almost low-tech. There was no exploit, no zero-day, no smart contract bug. The entire two hundred and forty-five million dollars was stolen through a phone call, a calm voice, and a victim who believed the person on the line worked at Google. The technique is called vishing, short for voice phishing, and it has become one of the dominant ways large crypto wallets are compromised because it bypasses every security tool except human skepticism.
For ordinary holders the lesson is sharp. No legitimate company will ever call to ask for a security code, a seed phrase, or remote access to a wallet, and any inbound call making one of those requests is the attack itself, regardless of how professional it sounds. Hanging up and calling the company back through its official number costs nothing and stops the technique cold.
