Egregoros

Generally yes, so it takes a couple more days. But if you've got a hostage, you can PROBABLY afford wait a couple more days - maybe a week. That's why I said it would have to be reconfigured as a kidnap-and-ransom attack, because you can't stand in their house waiting.

It's a bit more complex, but not massively, and it opens up potential targets to ~everyone.

However, what is perhaps the scariest part of the whole thing is that there was some local thugs being controlled by a remote person on a phone... The mastermind here might as well be in Russia, NK, or Iran.

Think about what kind of crime becomes possible if you can basically hire muscle on fiverr....

>The mastermind here might as well be in Russia, NK, or Iran.
More like israel, jew York, or Maimi.

The attackers knew exactly how much money people had, that means they have access to either state tax records or internal records from US crypto exchanges with KYS (know your customer). That means they weren't just random street thugs, in all likely-hood they were organized by either jew intelligence services or government workers with access.

They hit major brow infested cities, you think the local shitskin politicians are above this kind of thing?

Well then you're just talking about the mafia, but the mafia has rules. You can't just go around popping banks (for example), if you could, then they'd have been doing this like a motherfucker all throughout the 70s and 80s...

So for example, an assassination needs to be approved at a high level. Regional guys have authority to greenlight it if it's some lowlife crook, but if it's something that can cause backlash, then it has to go way up.

Even if it's the Russian mob we're talking about, there's still rules. You can't go killing politician's family members for instance. It's one thing that's off limits, the same way that nuclear strikes on each others' capital cities are off limits.

Right now, the country which has the closest to no rules is Iran. And even Iran doesn't strike desalination plants in Israel, so there's still rules. But if I were to guess about the crypto thing, I'd say most likely this is Iranians working with Iranian intelligence (they got the info by hacking) and they're using purchased street muscle.

I don't think Israeli / US mafia (they're the same) have this much freedom.

It's definitely possible.

In the past, messing around with non-mob people was heavily frowned upon. So like outright extortion was kind of off limits, but scams, and casinos, and illegal bookie operations, and prostitution and so on were all always considered fine...

But everything is always in flux, so it could be possible... But my instinct is that it's coming from a country which is basically at war with the US (i.e. Iran or Russia).

A few years ago there was a raft of crypto exchange hacks and they were traced back to North Korea. I presume that lots of actors would have the capability to do such hacks, so the fact that it was all NK implies that everyone else had a red line about hacking exchanges.

Also about 6 years ago there was a raft of corporate espionage hacks coming from Russia, and then suddenly they all stopped - so the US must have come to an understanding and a red line was drawn...