How a Teenaged Hacker Pulled Off a $24 Million Crypto Heist
The break-in happened around 4 a m
Original Article: How a Teenaged Hacker Pulled Off a $24 Million Crypto Heist
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The break-in happened around 4 a.m., on a leafy street in the otherwise sleepy and sleeping village of Irvington, New York. Four men wearing ski masks and gloves, armed with knives, rope, brass knuckles, and a fake 9 mm, crept around the back of the large suburban home, their ghostly forms captured by its security-camera footage. As would later be alleged in court proceedings, the rope was intended to tie up the family. The knife was to torture them until the oldest son told them what they wanted to know. The gun was for show: A fake gun can evoke the same amount of fear as a real one but leads to lesser charges. These men knew what they were doing. And they apparently knew exactly what they wanted to find.
A bedroom community 20 miles up the Hudson River from New York City, Irvington’s whole point is to be a place of calm, not calamity, a place where white-collar families can disperse themselves sparsely in well-appointed homes with river vistas and two-car garages. There are good public schools. There is a historic Main Street that runs up from the water, a parade of American flags suspended from buildings that look as though they were plucked from a Christmas village. The town is named for former resident Washington Irving, whose Rip Van Winkle is cast in bronze, forever waking from his long slumber in the yard beside Town Hall, oblivious to the soccer moms in Lululemon and the teenagers in Ivy League sweatshirts who saunter by throughout the day. Beyond Main Street, tended lawns extend up into the hills, deliberately at a peaceful remove from the crime and grime of urban life.
And yet, Ellis Pinsky had feared that something dangerous and violent was headed toward Irvington. He’d feared it for weeks now. He’d sat in his 12th-grade math class and pondered the various means by which calamity might befall him, how it would arrive, what form it would take, what he might do to defend himself. His answer to that last concern was a shotgun, which he had stored in a drawer by his bed, near the chess trophies he’d won when he was younger, when the games he played stuck to their borders. At Blueline Shooting Sports a couple of towns over, his slender, studious form had drawn looks from the rougher types who spent their afternoons aiming assault weapons at targets next to a store full of tactical supplies. He ignored the stares, drawn the shotgun up to his smooth, handsome face under its shock of black hair, trained his brown eyes on a point in the distance, and pulled the trigger.
He’d been right to prepare. On May 23, 2020, a broken window set off the alarm that woke Pinsky’s family. An unknown man dropped down into their unfinished basement, his own gaze trained in the direction of a safe that had been installed by a previous owner.
In the floors above, Pinsky loaded the shotgun and met his mother in the hallway outside his bedroom. She directed him to the adjacent room where his three younger brothers were gathered, terrified and tearful. Pinsky hustled them behind something — a chair, a mattress; he can’t remember now — closed the door and backed away from it, the shotgun raised to his shoulder, his finger on the trigger, his eyes on the doorknob. Then he waited. From somewhere downstairs, there was yelling. One of his brothers whimpered. The gun metal grew warm in Pinsky’s hands.
He knew — or, at least, was pretty sure he knew — why the men were there, breaking into his family home at 4 a.m. Two years earlier, on Jan. 7, 2018, ...