Did you know
Yolo
isn't Spanish?
— In A Van, Down By The Ripper
By the time Abbie did her third Bitcoin meetup, we had the whole thing down to a science. She was cluelessly reeling in marks, and Beanie was searching their homes with Foke's goons. Owen and Yaz were scouting for more bars for Bitcoin meetups. It seemed safer if the events weren't always at the same place.
I only had to be around a couple times a month to do my part of the shady valet scheme. I didn't trust anybody else to make copies of keys.
Since everything was running smooth, it was time for me to take the show on the road. But instead of creating small events, I hit big ones that already existed.
First stop? Miami.
The Bitcoin 2022 Conference was held from April 6th to the 9th, at the Miami Beach Convention Center.
A lot of high quality marks were gathered in one place.
I was there too, but I needed a crew.
Foke set me up with a local guy named Smax.
Smax turned out to be the enforcer for a horrifying drug dealer named El Chacal, which is Spanish for The Jackal, though that detail is unimportant.
Señor Smax loaned me his primo goon, a guy named Tripa, pronounced as Treepa, short for Destripador, which means Ripper and/or Disemboweler, though let's look past all of that, because the Disemboweler brought in a small team of Haitian gang bangers known as Los Devoradores de Almas, which means The Devourers of Souls, who...
...oh sweet baby Jeebus...
...Look, I know what you're thinking, but...
...Yes, I acknowledge that it sounds pretty bad when viewed from your perspective, but...
...JUST STOP.
Full stop.
My plan was rock solid. And, more importantly, it worked.
I set up valet parking near the convention center. I got orange muhfuggin' cones. I made signs. "Welcome Hodlers! Valet Parking!" My Haitian bros were parking cars. They had vests. Somehow, vests make everything look legit. Since it was valet parking, drivers were oh so happy to hand over their keys, unknowingly giving me access to their homes, and since I'd only be running this scam in Miami once, whether or not the drivers got their cars back was not my problem.
I borrowed a van to use as a mobile workshop for copying marks' keys with my HPC Speedex. But I didn't want keys from rental cars. A rental meant the driver was from out of town and probably staying in a hotel.
Bitcoiners don't travel with their seed words and getting access to hotel rooms would be too complicated anyway.
I wanted local homes, so, I needed local cars.
I spent the first night of the Bitcoin conference scouting locations. On the second night, I ran my valet scheme and got forty-five sets of keys. That's a lot of keys to copy with a manual key duplicator, and holy hell were my hands hurting by the time I was done. My arms too. But I wasn't in a rush, because anybody attending the conference was there for hours.
Ever heard of shooting fish in a barrel? I was harpooning whales in a tank, and the whales never knew.
Foke had a guy for pairing license plates with names and addresses, but it took time, so I headed back to Indiana to work on other stuff.
When the info finally arrived, it was glorious.
The mark of a great mark is somebody who has money, but isn't so rich they have great home security too.
I hung a map of Miami in my basement workshop.
I made a list of marks and put them on different colored sticky notes to put 'em on the map, depending on where they lived.
Yellow meant west, pink meant south. Green meant north, because in Miami, that's where the money is. Bal Harbour. Sunny Isles. North Beach.
I went back to Florida a month later to search the homes. I found a team of lifters the same way as last time. I let them find me.
I hired three. Alejandro, Riki, and a guy named Lolo who did not appreciate it when I called him Yolo. Oh well.
Smax's main man, El Disembowelio, provided muscle in exchange for copies of keys to any homes where we didn't find seed words.
My God. The whole operation was a thing of beauty.
We were hitting six places a week. And as I took down mark after mark, they never said a word, because they thought they got hacked online.
I'm not gonna say my time in Florida was incident-free. Alejandro got sloppy and broke some kind of sculpture thing in somebody's condo, but the mark didn't have seed words, and the muscle made the mess look like a break-in, so... it was fine. I had to stop using him, but Riki and Lolo were eager for more work, and the results spoke for themselves.
Overall, my hit rate was down, but the value was way up. In Gary, I was able to find Bitcoin seed words for half of the marks, but maybe one in ten was big. In Miami, only one in three marks had findable seed words, but some of the guys at the conference had serious coin. I snatched 70.19 BTC, total. I only got to keep half, after expenses, but still. It was a quality haul.
I swear to God I cut through Florida like buddah.
That's butter, not Buddha. The fuck is wrong with you?
Editor's Note:
I feel the need to remind readers that every component of this scheme constitutes multiple felonies. All of it is profoundly and unquestionably illegal. It is also unambiguously awful. We do not condone any of this.