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Thieves Grab $451K in Cash From Hong Kong Crypto Trader

The robbers lured a female cryptocurrency trader into an office and threatened her with a weapon, according to a report.

Updated Sep 14, 2021, 10:58 a.m. Published Jan 19, 2021, 2:00 p.m.

Hong Kong police are searching for robbers who lured a female cryptocurrency trader into an office and robbed her of HK$3.5 million (roughly $451,000) in cash on Monday.

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The trader was paid in cash after using her mobile phone to complete an online sale of tether (USDT) tokens, the South China Morning Post reported Tuesday, citing a police source.
After the cash had changed hands, three men are reported to have rushed from another room carrying a knife or a rod and grabbed the money and phone before locking the trader in the office.
The men had previously made tether trades with the woman, possibly to win her trust, police said. It's not clear how much was stolen in total, when accounting for the tokens also taken.
This is the second incident in Hong Kong involving robbers targeting cryptocurrency holders in two weeks.
On Jan. 5, criminals tricked a man into a meeting for a face-to-face trade, before stealing cash and bitcoin worth around $852,000 and then pushing him out of a car.

Crime Hong Kong CoinFlash

Tanzeel Akhtar

Tanzeel Akhtar has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, BBC, Bloomberg, CNBC, Forbes Africa, Financial Times, The Street, Citywire, Investing.com, Euromoney, Yahoo! Finance, Benzinga, Kitco News, African Business Magazine, Hedge Week, Campden Family Office, Modern Investor, Spear's Wealth Management Magazine, Global Investor, ETF.com, ETF Stream, CIO UK, Funds Global Asia, Portfolio Institutional, Interactive Investor, Bitcoin Magazine, CryptoNews.com, Bitcoin.com, The Local, The Next Web, Mining Journal, Money Marketing, Marketing Week and more. Tanzeel trained as a foreign correspondent at the University of Helsinki, Finland and newspaper journalist at the University of Central Lancashire, UK. She holds a BA (Honours) in English Literature from the Manchester Metropolitan University, UK and completed a semester abroad as an ERASMUS student at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, Greece. She is NCTJ Qualified - Media Law, Public Administration and passed the Shorthand 100WPM with distinction. She does not currently hold value in any digital currencies or projects.