Speaker 1: It's time for our True Crime Tuesday. The story is true,
Speaker 1: sounds true? No, it sounds made up. I don't know.
Speaker 1: Garry and Shannon present True Crime.
Speaker 2: There is a really weird world that exists that you
Speaker 2: and I probably don't know very much about. And it's
Speaker 2: those people in the very high echelons in the world
Speaker 2: of crypto. And as difficult as it is for a
Speaker 2: lot of people to just simply understand what crypto trading is,
Speaker 2: how anybody can make money at it, how it has
Speaker 2: survived as long as it has, this is going to
Speaker 2: add a tiny bit of probably fear to that keeping
Speaker 2: people away from crypto. The Wall Street Journal published a
Speaker 2: story about the ransom that exists, ransom cases that exist
Speaker 2: in cryptocurrency, and that there have been greater and greater
Speaker 2: incursions of safety, I guess, threats to safety in that
Speaker 2: very elite crypto world. Three men in black masks jump
Speaker 2: a thirty four year old woman in Paris. Her father
Speaker 2: runs Paymium, which is a cryptocurrency exchange based in France.
Speaker 2: They had canisters, a mace, they had a gun. They
Speaker 2: tried to force this woman and her baby into an
Speaker 2: idling van disguised as a delivery truck. Her husband was
Speaker 2: there was able to throw himself between his family and
Speaker 2: the attackers. A neighbor was able to grab the child
Speaker 2: and get it to safety. The other neighbors were closing in.
Speaker 2: Shopkeeper shows up to throw a fire extinguisher. The kidnappers
Speaker 2: I should say would be kidnappers, jump into their van
Speaker 2: and they speed off. The latest in a wave of
Speaker 2: violent criminal attacks and potential abductions around the world, including
Speaker 2: some here in the United States, that target these crypto
Speaker 2: executives and sometimes their families.
Speaker 1: Like this one.
Speaker 2: Victims have been pistol whipped, some of them have been kidnapped.
Speaker 2: In at least two cases, their fingers have been severed.
Speaker 1: Again. It sounds like this is going to be a movie.
Speaker 2: The goal is to get millions of dollars in ransom
Speaker 2: in cryptocurrency. These are sometimes called wrench attacks like the
Speaker 2: Tool simply because they rely on very simple tools for
Speaker 2: inflicting pain to coerce their victims, very old school mafia
Speaker 2: sound to it. Hacking used to be the biggest risk.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's still a big risk for crypto people.
Speaker 2: But to thwart those hackers, cryptocurrency investors take their digital
Speaker 2: wallets offline in favor of a physical device. It makes
Speaker 2: some more Making it remote and offline makes it harder
Speaker 2: for somebody to steal simply by hacking into it, so
Speaker 2: real world crypto crime is what bypasses those safeguards. A
Speaker 2: bitcoin security company called Kasa, the co founder says, a
Speaker 2: lot of people are getting to the hide your gold
Speaker 2: under the mattress level of security. But if you're a
Speaker 2: high profile person, that's when you have to worry about
Speaker 2: the physical attack.
Speaker 1: A cryptocurrency exchange.
Speaker 2: Just this week, Coinbase disclosed that as many as ninety
Speaker 2: seven thousand people had their personal information stolen, including addresses.
Speaker 2: The company said it was likely stolen by bribed contractors
Speaker 2: or employees that worked in their customer support, and that
Speaker 2: it had refused a twenty million dollar ransom demand. We've
Speaker 2: seen that with you know, hospitals, municipalities, et cetera. Somebody
Speaker 2: will hack into a system and basically hold it hostage
Speaker 2: until the hospital or police department or municipality whatever pays
Speaker 2: the ransom of free up that computer system. Cryptocurrency has
Speaker 2: also surged over the course of the last year. Bitcoin alone.
Speaker 2: Bitcoin is up fifty four percent in the last year,
Speaker 2: so there are people making millions of dollars on all
Speaker 2: of this. At least five crypto related abductions have taken
Speaker 2: place in France in just the last few months, dozens
Speaker 2: of others around the world in the last year. For example,
Speaker 2: in Australia, a crypto billionaire was almost kidnapped whilst vacationing
Speaker 2: in Estonia. He was able to fight off the attackers
Speaker 2: posing as painters. In March, a crypto influencer out of
Speaker 2: Houston was assaulted before her husband got into a shootout
Speaker 2: with the bad guys who invaded their home in the
Speaker 2: middle of the night demanding her laptop. Some of the
Speaker 2: assaults have been clumsy, some of them messy. But the
Speaker 2: problem is there are now organized crime rings that are
Speaker 2: seeing this as a major profit potential, and once you
Speaker 2: get a little bit more sophistication behind some of these
Speaker 2: abduction attacks, you're going to see people go away for
Speaker 2: a long time, and I mean disappear. In September, there
Speaker 2: was a Floorida man who was sentenced to forty seven
Speaker 2: years in prison because he led a crime ring that
Speaker 2: carried out a string of home invasion across home invasion
Speaker 2: robberies in multiple states. In search specifically of crypto. In
Speaker 2: one of the attacks, he held a gun to the
Speaker 2: head of a guy in Durham, North Carolina, threatened to
Speaker 2: cut off his his junk. The victim eventually was able
Speaker 2: to transfer one hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of
Speaker 2: crypto to The guy was later ordered to pay more
Speaker 2: than five hundred thousand dollars in restitution to his victims
Speaker 2: as part of his sentencing. Just last week, the Interior
Speaker 2: Minister in France gathered a bunch of crypto companies for
Speaker 2: a meeting to try to present new security measures for
Speaker 2: that sector. They said the attack that attempted kidnapping from
Speaker 2: last week appeared similar to other recent abductions in France,
Speaker 2: in which they said these ringleaders are recruiting a bunch
Speaker 2: of young criminals they never meet, using apps like Telegram
Speaker 2: and Signal, and then remotely controlling them to execute their plan. Again,
Speaker 2: the French Interior Ministry says that these are probably linked.
Speaker 2: At least some of these, like I said, have been
Speaker 2: successful in terms of the abductions, and definitely the physical
Speaker 2: assaults have been successful, with some people losing their fingers
Speaker 2: over this whole crypto thing. We're in the midst of
Speaker 2: True Crime Tuesday and talking about some of the craziest
Speaker 2: true crime stories that we've seen over the last couple
Speaker 2: of years, and I got to tell you this is
Speaker 2: one of them. The story behind Fred and Rose West
Speaker 2: a British horror story.
Speaker 1: I said it was a book.
Speaker 2: I meant to say that it was actually a Netflix
Speaker 2: documentary that has come out and it's a series. And
Speaker 2: I will say now, based on the story, it is
Speaker 2: not for public consumption, or at least not a general
Speaker 2: family watching.
Speaker 1: Shall we say?
Speaker 2: This documentary ends with a judge sentencing Rose West to
Speaker 2: life in prison. She was married to Fred West, and
Speaker 2: back in nineteen sixty nine. Fred was twenty seven years old,
Speaker 2: Rose was only fifteen. The power dynamic in that gives
Speaker 2: you an idea of how this relationship started. He controlled
Speaker 2: every aspect of her life and he pimped her out. Okay,
Speaker 2: that's not setting a great table for the relationship going forward.
Speaker 2: They had several kids together, at least ten, and the
Speaker 2: whole thing starts with I mentioned that the documentary ends
Speaker 2: with her being sentenced to life in prison. It starts
Speaker 2: with police discovering the remains of one of their daughters
Speaker 2: in their home, there was this kind of weird and uncomfortable.
Speaker 2: Everybody thought it was a joke at the time that
Speaker 2: would go between several of the children, which was, if
Speaker 2: you misbehave, you'll end up under the patio like Heather,
Speaker 2: and friends of theirs heard the kids say that joke
Speaker 2: to each other and never thought anything about it because
Speaker 2: they didn't know there was a Heather until her body
Speaker 2: was found, Like I said, under the patio. She had
Speaker 2: been missing since nineteen eighty seven, and in the years
Speaker 2: after she disappeared, the stories about where she ended up changed.
Speaker 2: Parents would tell the different stories. It was February of
Speaker 2: ninety four that her remains were found underneath the patio
Speaker 2: of the rear garden of their home. Fred was arrested.
Speaker 2: Fred admitted that he killed the daughter in interviews with
Speaker 2: police there in Gloucester, but that was one of the
Speaker 2: last vast murders that he committed. Fred was accused of
Speaker 2: starting way back in nineteen sixty seven, killing at least
Speaker 2: twelve young women. And remember that was about the time
Speaker 2: that he was starting to get this relationship with Rose.
Speaker 2: He was again killing a dozen women. Rose was convicted
Speaker 2: of ten of the murders. The date back to the
Speaker 2: early seventies. The documentary reveals also the story of Alison Chambers,
Speaker 2: who had run away from home. In the series, her
Speaker 2: sister Desra reads a letter from nineteen seventy nine that
Speaker 2: her mother received from Alison, saying that she was going
Speaker 2: to be living with this great new couple, Fred and
Speaker 2: Rose and looking after their children, acting sort of as
Speaker 2: a nanny. A few months later, she goes missing and
Speaker 2: her remains are found at the house there in Gloucester.
Speaker 2: The series does not actually center on the living kids
Speaker 2: because a lot of them are not on speaking terms
Speaker 2: with each other today. There's a lot of blame that
Speaker 2: goes back and forth between them. The eldest son, a
Speaker 2: guy named Steven, says, I don't speak to my siblings.
Speaker 2: There are no large, happy family get togethers. Too much
Speaker 2: has gone on. It's probably too painful for us. Phil Davis,
Speaker 2: is the husband of an older sister, explained every few
Speaker 2: years the cases back in the media, like now with
Speaker 2: this new documentary, the public public gets interested again. But
Speaker 2: it's the kids who live with the pain of what
Speaker 2: happened on a daily basis, and in the series it's
Speaker 2: the relatives of the family. It's that second concentric circle
Speaker 2: who gets the last word. Brelinda Mott, whose sister Juanita
Speaker 2: remains were found in the cellar of the West House,
Speaker 2: is seen visiting the sister's tombstone and she says, this
Speaker 2: is why I say to my children every single time
Speaker 2: I say good night or goodbye, I always say I
Speaker 2: love you, because you never know when it's the last time.
Speaker 2: Desra said, talking about her sister Allison, the one that
Speaker 2: was a nanny, said it's cathartic. She's gotten so used
Speaker 2: to compartmentalizing all of this, she says, I've never really
Speaker 2: worked through it, so it was a help to her
Speaker 2: to take part in the documentary and it's filmmaking, so again,
Speaker 2: just an awful true crime story that's going to be
Speaker 2: this Netflix. Fred and Rose West a British horror story.