Though it only had the distinction of being the world’s tallest building for 11 months, the Chrysler Building in midtown Manhattan has remained one of the most recognizable skyscrapers in the world — and a glimmering architectural icon of the Art Deco period, which celebrates its centennial on April 28. The 1920s and 1930s gave rise to buildings such as Chicago’s Tribune Tower and New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel that mixed materials and colors through the use of steel, glass, terracotta, stone and marble. This new modern style prized vertical designs that drew the eye upwards, decorative glass and metalwork with geometric and floral motifs, high-shine lacquered surfaces, and unique sculptural adornments — overall, a movement toward originality instead of references to the past. “Until the 1920s, American architects tended to design their buildings with one eye looking over their left shoulder of Europe,” said Anthony W. Robins, a founding member and former vice president of The Art Deco Society of New York, in a phone call. Architectural styles in the US often followed revivals popular across the West, he noted, such as the Greek, Romanesque and Italian Renaissance revivals that fell in and out of favor. But Art Deco didn’t have a name for decades; in 1966, during renewed interest in the era, a group of curators named the style after the “Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes,” which took place on April 28, 1925 in Paris and drew some 16 million visitors over seven months, forging a new period of architecture, design and decorative arts that influenced many parts of the world. The 1,046-foot-tall Chrysler Building, completed in May of 1930, was the pinnacle of both the then-unnamed Art Deco period and the skyscraper boom that rapidly transformed New York City’s skyline. It dethroned the Eiffel Tower as the world’s tallest structure, and was only eclipsed by the Empire State Building before such lofty projects came to a halt as the global economy cratered during the Great Depression, Robins noted. “(The Chrysler Building) and the Empire State Building were the culmination of this huge skyscraper race,” he said. “They weren’t the last to open up before the Depression put an end to it, but they were … the two that took the title of the ‘world’s tallest building.’” Higher and higher Designed by the architect William van Alen for the automotive magnate Walter P. Chrysler, who took over the project from the developer and politician William H. Reynolds, the tower features a steel frame and white and gray bricks that ascend skyward with three vertical columns of windows on each side, flanked by horizontal rows that appear like notches at each level. Climaxing with a cascade of curvilinear sunbursts at its peak, it tapers off to a gleaming 185-foot-tall spire — one that had to be secretly assembled and erected from the inside to deliver on its promise to become the world’s new tallest building. During construction, the Chrysler’s superlative was at risk by a structure rising in tandem at 40 Wall Street. Though the New York Times reported in October 1929 that Paul Starrett, the downtown building’s developer, denied competing for “height supremacy,” the building plans had changed to accommodate additional floors. The press played up the rivalry over the course of a year, Robins noted, until Van Alen resolved it by having the spire covertly assembled from five parts on the 65th floor and quickly hoisted up in 90 minutes so that competitors would not know its final height until it was completed. With the Empire State Building on the horizon, as well as plans for other supertalls that were never built — including the Noyes Building, a monumental, four-block wide, 1,600-foot-tall terracotta tower that, in New York’s skyline, would have only fallen short of One World Trade Center today — the Chrysler Building was the symbol of a rapidly changing skyline. “What next February’s skyline will be like it would take a rash guesser to say,” the New York Times journalist H.I. Brock wrote in 1930 of the year ahead. “But it will be different. July’s skyline will be a new skyline, for that matter.” Striking details What makes the Chrysler Building so striking can be attributed, in part, to the experimentation of the Art Deco period, with its variety of textures, colors and materials, including its use of Nirosta steel: a new type of rustproof stainless steel from Germany. “The color in the metal — that extraordinary silvery glow of the Nirosta at the top — it just stands out. You get there when the sun hits it on a good day, and it knocks your socks off,” Robins said. But one landmark piece of legislation also contributed to its visual appeal, Robin said. New York City’s 1916 Zoning Resolution — the first citywide zoning code in the US to be established — included a requirement that large buildings taper off as they rise so as not to block the sun. Van Alen used the Chrysler Building’s five step-like setbacks to vary the design at each level, including ornaments on each ledge. Steel eagle heads and sculptural pineapples can be spotted on different levels, as well as replicas of Chrysler’s 1929 radiator hub caps — a tribute to innovation as well as a direct reference to the building’s original owner. “It’s very common among Art Deco skyscrapers that the ornaments, aside from being ornamental, will… tell us who the building was built for and include the building itself in the ornament somewhere,” Robins said. Those motifs continue inside, where the skyscraper’s dramatic vertical entrances of polished black granite and recessed glass panels lead visitors into the red marble and yellow travertine lobby. On the ceiling, Edward Trumbull’s monumental mural, “Transport and Human Endeavor,” is dedicated to the human ingenuity and technology that created the building, with a depiction of the skyscraper itself included. Shifting attitudes For all its favorable attention today, the Chrysler Building was completed to mixed reviews. Architecture critics considered the last-minute spire to be a stunt, according to the New York Times. In 1931, the acclaimed critic Lewis Mumford wrote: “Heaven help the person who critically looks at this building without the help of distance and heavy mists. The ornamental treatment of the facade is a series of restless mistakes.” The architectural tides also shifted drastically as the International Style architectural movement swiftly rose to prominence in the 1930s, prizing functionality in its blocky concrete forms with no decor — the antithesis of its predecessors. But with Art Deco’s revival in the 1960s — along with its official name — as well as the skyscraper’s designation as a federal and city landmark in 1976 and 1978, respectively, the Chrysler Building’s renown grew with time. That wasn’t the case for its architect, however, as Van Alen’s promising career dwindled, and he became mired in litigation with his client, Chrysler, over payment for the project. (The courts ultimately ruled in Val Alen’s favor and he received his fee.) “The Chrysler is the building in his life, and it was the last major building in his life,” Robins said. Though the building was completed in 1930, it took until 1981 for Van Alen’s full vision to be realized, when lighting technicians illuminated the skyscraper’s crown for the first time according to the architect’s original designs. “There’s no spire that looks anything like that,” Robins said. “You’re flying over Manhattan — that’s the one that just catches your eye.”

The Fort Lauderdale, Florida, property has an asking price of nearly $29M A home with room for seven cars in its garages is on the market in South Florida. The waterfront property, situated in sunny Fort Lauderdale, carries a price tag of just shy of $29 million, according to its listing with Douglas Elliman’s Julie Jones. The Modern Mediterranean-style main house boasts nearly 7,700 square feet of living space. It features a total of five bedrooms, with six full bathrooms scattered throughout. It underwent an extensive remodel and expansion about 13 years ago. The listing said the home contains "custom detailing & high quality finishes." It is replete with a chef’s kitchen that has access to a 2,000-square-foot covered outdoor living area. In a separate bar area within the home, there is a large fish tank. A formal living room offers plenty of seating in front of a fireplace. Views of the Intracoastal Waterway, which runs some 3,000 miles along the Atlantic coast, can be found throughout the home, according to its listing. There is also a separate 2,300-square-foot guest house on the 0.82-acre estate. It was constructed in 2018, the listing said. Between the main house and the guest house, its garages offer space for seven vehicles, a key design choice driven by the seller’s love of cars, Douglas Elliman said. A large pool pavilion and an 18-seat bar are among some of its outdoor offerings. It also offers the opportunity for al fresco dining with a covered outdoor dining area. The property boasts two pools, one of which is just steps away from the outdoor dining area and bar. It comes with nearly 330 feet of water frontage, with two separate docks providing access to the water and boating. The ZIP code in which the home is located has homes with asking prices of up to $31 million, according to data on Realtor.com’s website. The median sale price was $1.2 million. More than 184,200 people call Fort Lauderdale home, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Winning the trust of convicted burglar Jerry Christy was the kind of challenge undercover FBI investigator Ronnie Walker had spent years preparing for. A founding member of the bureau’s specialist Art Crime Team, the Oregon-based agent was well-versed in art history — and trained to pose as a would-be buyer, authenticator or dealer of stolen works. Christy, meanwhile, was being covertly investigated in 2007 over the theft of several artworks, including a 17th-century etching by Dutch master Rembrandt van Rijn. “That etching that was my entrée into his ring,” recalled Walker, who recently retired from the FBI after almost 29 years, allowing him to speak more openly about his career exposing fraudsters, forgers and traffickers in elaborate sting operations. “At the time, I was really hyper-focused on learning about fine art prints,” added the former agent, who met Christy through a confidential source in 2007. “And I made him believe I was the kind of person who could sell a Rembrandt.” But things got trickier for Walker, he said, when Christy’s expert accomplice got in touch. “(Christy) took art off walls, but he wouldn’t necessarily know if it was valuable or not. He would figure that out later on,” Walker told CNN over Zoom. “So, starting off that operation, I was the expert — I knew more than him. But, pretty quickly, the tables turned… the stakes got pretty intense once I found myself going head-to-head with an art dealer.” Around 18 months earlier, Walker said, Christy had unexpectedly vanished from the FBI’s radar. It transpired he was serving time, for an unrelated theft, at Washington State Corrections Center, court records show. By happenstance, Christy had shared a cell with Kurt Lidtke, a disgraced art dealer whom the FBI said was imprisoned for selling his clients’ works without paying them proceeds. Using the latter’s knowledge of the Seattle art market — namely the whereabouts of some of its most valuable paintings — the two cellmates began plotting an ambitious crime spree, Walker said. “They were going to hit dozens of collections in the Pacific Northwest to the tune of several hundred million dollars,” he added. Walker, still masquerading as an art dealer, resumed contact with Christy upon his release from prison. Christy soon carried out a successful burglary, while Lidtke was still in prison, according to court documents. And it wasn’t long before his new co-conspirator called Walker to sell him some paintings — and to sound him out, the former investigator said. “Fortunately, (Lidtke) thought I was a dealer who specialized primarily in California Impressionists, and he was a dealer who specialized in the Northwest School (a 20th-century art movement),” said Walker, adding that they later “spent a lot of time talking about our respective areas of expertise.” Walker used his art market knowledge to build rapport with the dealer, he said, and gained the duo’s trust by pretending to sell three of their stolen artworks. He also began gathering information about their next potential victim as the FBI prepared a trap at the target’s home. Even as authorities appeared to be closing in — Christy was confronted by police while surveilling the property from a parked pickup truck, though he was allowed to leave the scene — Walker believes his performance had been so convincing that Lidtke was oblivious to his involvement until the very end, attributing Christy’s brief encounter with police on bad luck. “Kurt (Lidtke) didn’t trust his instincts and blame me,” he recalled. “We’d had a long enough, and a solid enough, relationship up to that point that he didn’t listen to that inner voice saying, ‘Well, if only three people in the world knew (about the planned robbery) it must have been (him)’.” The FBI averted the burglary and later arrested the pair, according to court documents. Walker said that incriminating recordings he collected during the sting operation helped secure convictions for both Lidtke and Christy, on charges of conspiracy and transportation of stolen goods. In 2011, they were sentenced to four and five-and-a quarter years in prison, respectively. ‘It’s easier to lie when you’re telling the truth’ The Art Crime Team, and Walker’s involvement with it, dates to the early years of the Iraq War. As US troops advanced on Baghdad following the 2003 invasion, looters had plundered an estimated 15,000 artifacts from the country’s National Museum in just 36 hours. At the time, Walker, who had been an FBI agent since 1996, expressed willingness to investigate the thefts. Despite studying business administration and accounting at college, he gravitated toward art history courses and was interested in cases involving cultural heritage. “I called (FBI) headquarters and said, ‘Hey, if you send a team to Iraq, put me in coach,” he recalled. Ultimately, the FBI did not send him, or any agents, to Baghdad in 2003. But amid widespread criticism of America’s failure to protect Iraq’s cultural property — and realizing a need for experts to track down the items, or to be deployed overseas in future looting incidents — the bureau established a specialist art team the following year. Thanks to his earlier interest and internal reputation for sophisticated undercover operations, Walker was recruited to the unit. He was one of fewer than 10 founding agents who would be trained in the history, vocabulary and, most importantly, business of art. “Within the first year of being on the team, I started taking more advanced level college courses that helped inform my approach to these operations,” Walker recalled. The team was focused not only on thefts, from homes, galleries or archeological sites, but also forgery and trafficking rings. Given how many stolen artworks end up on the US market, it also investigated art crimes committed overseas. Today, the unit has more than doubled in size and employs experts in fields including archaeology and anthropology, as well as former art market professionals. Since its founding in 2004, the Art Crime Team has recovered more than 20,000 items of cultural property, including thousands of items from the National Museum of Iraq (though the FBI estimates that between 7,000 and 10,000 of those remain unaccounted for). This two-decade haul is valued at over $1 billion, which Walker called “an oversized return on investment” for the FBI. And that figure doesn’t include the potential value of seized fakes that could have generated billions of dollars if successfully sold. One of the former agent’s last cases involved a dealer with “about $2 billion in inventory — that was all fake,” he said. Recent successes speak to the unit’s broad remit. Last year alone, its investigations led to the return of a Revolutionary War-era musket to a Philadelphia museum; the recovery of a pocket watch once owned by Theodore Roosevelt that had been missing since the 1980s; and the repatriation, to Japan, of 22 artifacts looted following the Battle of Okinawa in 1945. One of the team’s most high-profile cases involved a pair of ruby slippers, worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” that were recovered 13 years after being stolen from a museum in Minnesota. For the latter operation, Walker posed as a Hollywood memorabilia authenticator to help lure in a suspect seeking the $1 million reward for the objects’ return, he said. To prepare, he spent time with experts at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History (which owns another pair of Garland’s set-worn ruby slippers), to study exactly how they would examine the objects. But while there are undercover agents who can be “anything, at any time, in any place,” Walker said, he is not of that mold, despite sometimes running up to five covert operations at a time. For him, it’s all about a level of preparation — sometimes over-preparation — akin to method acting. “It was understanding what that role should look like, and doing my best to understand that persona,” he said. “But at the end of the day, when you’re in role, the best thing to do is just be yourself. It’s easier to lie when you’re telling the truth.” In other words: The more he knew, the more convincing he could be. “I had a lot of cases that involved Warhol, whether thefts or fakes,” Walker offered as an example. “Studying Warhol, and getting a deeper knowledge of his materials, his processes and his compositions helped me in a lot of the undercover operations.” Walker’s performances also relied on “verbal or visual” cues typical of the professionals he was impersonating. He would sometimes dress the part, too, by wearing the expensive clothes of a high-end dealer or dressing down as the kind of uber-wealthy collector who “has so much money he doesn’t need to care about appearances,” the former agent said. He would wear a pair of lucky Bob Ross socks, too. It was, after all, dangerous work. “There were a few moments where I thought to myself, ‘Oh, this is how it ends,’” he recounted in a subsequent email exchange with CNN, adding: “Every single undercover meeting has the potential to escalate, even when dealing with individuals that don’t have a history of violence. In fact, I think those individuals that have no prior convictions can be more dangerous. They tend to have the most to lose.” Heists, tip-offs and master forgers Cases come to the Art Crime Team in various ways. Local police may alert the FBI to thefts if the stolen goods cross (or are thought to have crossed) state lines. The bureau also invites the public to provide anonymous tip-offs via its National Stolen Art File, a database containing thousands of missing paintings, sculptures and artifacts with cultural value, from candelabras to ceramics. Usually, however, missing art only comes to the authorities’ attention when it enters, or re-enters, the market. “Stealing the artwork is usually the easy part,” Walker said. “It’s selling the artwork that’s the hard part (because) there aren’t too many people in the world — and certainly no reputable art dealers — who want to buy stolen art. Often, the thieves haven’t really thought through how they’re going to sell the artworks.” The FBI’s running list of “top 10 art crimes” features various high-profile items that would now be near-impossible to move on the open market. There’s the $3 million Stradivarius violin stolen from a New York City apartment in 1995, and the Pierre-Auguste Renoir painting taken in an armed robbery from a Houston home in 2011. Then there is, in Walker’s view, the holy grail of art crime: The 13 works, including paintings by Rembrandt, Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas, snatched from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in a notorious 1990 heist. “If you said you had a lead on them tomorrow, in any part of the world, the team would throw every resource they could at (it),” he said of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum artworks. You might also, he added, end up $10 million richer thanks to the reward offered up by the museum’s board. Art criminals’ motivations are almost always financial, Walker said. Their downfall often shares a common theme, too, whether it’s trusting an undercover agent or seeking big-money rewards for stolen goods: greed. And while the former agent didn’t see a significant increase in art-related crimes over his two decades investigating them (if there appear to be more media reports, it’s because “we just got better at doing our job”), he believes perpetrators’ scope and abilities grew in that time. “Twenty years ago, largely, fraud was more of the household names and the dead guys. It was the Rothkos or the Picassos. But now it’s living contemporary artists that are being faked in their lifetime,” he said, adding that technology now allows forgers to operate without conventional artistic skills. “There are printing technologies that can mimic brushstrokes. So, with a small investment and a really good high-resolution camera, you can create fakes today that rival the quality of a (master forger).” The threat posed to living artists is now Walker’s main preoccupation. After retiring from the FBI in December, he founded the Art Legacy Institute (ALI), a non-profit helping artists protect their work and livelihoods from fraud. Having spent a career solving crimes, he now hopes to prevent them from happening in the first place. Forgeries come in two guises: either a known work is replicated, or a new composition is created in the artist’s style and positioned as a previously undocumented work. According to Walker, the solution — to the latter, at least — is surprisingly simple: cataloging. ALI is creating a detailed digital archive, stored on its server, that he hopes would become the definitive record of an artist’s output. “Documenting what you create, as an artist, is the most important thing you can do… There’s been no shortage of artists who grind away for (decades) to finally get recognized for their contribution, for demand to increase, and then all of a sudden, the fraudsters come out,” he said. “They start attacking the style the artists were doing 20 or 30 years earlier that is not well documented — and it’s those gaps (in provenance) that allow the fraudsters to thrive.” As for identifying like-for-like replicas? That’s where technology now comes in. Last month, Walker’s organization announced a partnership with optical AI firm Alitheon that can create a unique “digital fingerprint” for any artwork — thousands of data points recording miniscule surface details, invisible to even the greatest forger’s eye. “It is simple to use and scalable, and it just works,” Walker said, joking: “Even an old, retired FBI agent can use this tech.”

A lettercard penned by one of the Titanic’s most well-known survivors from onboard the ship, days before it sank, has sold for £300,000 ($399,000) at auction. In the note, written to the seller’s great-uncle on April 10, 1912, first-class passenger Archibald Gracie wrote of the ill-fated steamship: “It is a fine ship but I shall await my journeys end before I pass judgment on her.” The letter was sold to a private collector from the United States on Saturday, according to auction house Henry Aldridge & Son in Wiltshire, England. The hammer price far exceeded the initial estimate price of £60,000. The letter is believed to be the sole example in existence from Gracie from onboard the Titanic, which sank off Newfoundland after hitting an iceberg, killing about 1,500 people on its maiden voyage. Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge described it as an “exceptional museum grade piece.” Gracie, who jumped from the ship and managed to scramble onto an overturned collapsible boat, was rescued by other passengers onboard a lifeboat and was taken to the R.M.S. Carpathia. He went on to write “The Truth about the Titanic,” an account of his experiences, when he returned to New York City. Gracie boarded the Titanic in Southampton on April 10, 1912, and was assigned first-class cabin C51. His book is seen as one of the most detailed accounts of the events of the night the ship sank, Aldridge said. Gracie did not fully recover from the hypothermia he suffered, and died of complications from diabetes in late 1912. The letter was postmarked Queenstown, Ireland, one of two stops the Titanic made before sinking.

South Carolina, Texas, Indiana rank highest in terms of affordability and homebuilding, new survey says Some states are faring better than others when it comes to housing affordability and homebuilding, according to a new report from Realtor.com. The online real estate marketplace bestowed letter grades on America’s 50 states and Washington, D.C., in its "Grading the States: Affordability & Homebuilding Report Cards" report. Only three earned As. Realtor.com looked at "housing affordability and the ability to meet future supply challenges through new construction" in determining how the states overall performed. "Our state report card rankings reveal stark disparities in housing affordability and homebuilding efforts across the U.S.," Realtor.com chief economist Danielle Hale said in a statement. "While some states are leading the way with strong homebuilding activity, others are grappling with high housing prices and sluggish construction." The report comes as American homebuyers have contended with affordability issues for quite some time. The U.S. is also staring down a supply gap of 3.8 million homes, according to Realtor.com. The following five states had the highest grades in the Realtor.com report: In top-ranked South Carolina, homes had median asking prices of $354,429, with households earning a median income of $64,989. The state’s "proactive homebuilding efforts" helped it achieve the sole "A" grade for affordability and homebuilding, the report said. Iowa boasted the highest Realtors Affordability Score at 0.92 out of 2. It saw a median price of $294,600, while its new construction premium came in at 58.4%, according to Realtor.com. The report attributed the Lone Star State’s A- (one of just two on the ranking) to its "impressive new construction." It was home to a permit-to-population ratio of 1.67 and was responsible for 15.3% of new construction permits in 2024, Realtor.com found. Indiana notched an overall score of 69.9 out of 100 for affordability and homebuilding, leading to it ranking No. 3 with a B+. The median asking price in North Carolina clocked in at $408,663, according to the report. It had "strong affordability and homebuilding activity," Realtor.com said. The largest share of states fell within the C-range for affordability and homebuilding, with six landing a C+, 14 getting a C and nine earning a C-, the report showed. Washington, D.C. also received a C-. Southern and Midwestern states made up the B range. Seven states – Oregon, Connecticut, California, Hawaii, New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island – got an "F" for affordability and homebuilding in Realtor.com’s report. According to an April 3 report from Realtor.com, homes across the country listed for a median price of $424,900 in March. That was flat year over year, but still 38.9% higher than March 2019. A separate survey released in late January by NerdWallet found about 15% of Americans intend to make a home purchase this year.

Stock market gyrations. Inflation. Layoffs of federal workers. A possible recession. Children may overhear their parents talking about these things and not fully understand what’s going on or how it may affect their family’s finances. But if the children have questions, parents should be ready to talk, experts say. “Parents are the biggest influence on kids’ financial learning,” said Ashley LeBaron-Black, an assistant professor of family life at Brigham Young University. Here are some tips for having conversations about money. Children don’t pay attention to the national economy, right? The nation’s economy seemed on solid ground at the beginning of the year, but economists expect that growth slowed in the first quarter amid uncertainty surrounding President Trump’s tariffs. Inflation has steadied, but the threatened tariffs could push prices higher again. At the same time, high borrowing costs are weighing on households, particularly those with lower incomes, and more people are late in paying their credit card bills. The stock market has whipsawed as Mr. Trump has repeatedly revised his tariff plans. And consumer expectations for the economy over the coming months have soured. Parents shouldn’t assume their children are oblivious to these issues, said Rebecca Maxcy, director and principal investigator at the University of Chicago’s Financial Education Initiative. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Children may not grasp the details, but they’ve overheard adults discussing prices at grocery stores and restaurants. And they’re probably hearing unfamiliar terms, like tariffs, from television or online or from friends at school. This month, for example, news reports discussed the possible impact of the Trump administration’s proposed tariffs on the pricing and availability of the new Nintendo Switch 2 video game console, an item of interest for many children. “It’s everywhere, it’s so in your face, and kids are hearing it and seeing it,” Ms. Maxcy said. Children are intuitive, she said, and can pick up on concerns their parents have about the cost of living or the effect of market swings on their retirement savings or college savings. How can I talk about money without making my child anxious? If a child wonders how the family may be affected by changes in the economy, talking through the concerns can help reduce fear and confusion, said Maureen Kelley, a certified financial therapist in Denver. “You want to keep it honest but age-appropriate.” Rather than saying the family may need to cut back on spending, Ms. Kelley said, you can try “We’re being more careful with our money right now” or “We’re adjusting how we spend our money.” Parents can emphasize any steps they have taken to prepare for financial potholes — like creating a rainy-day savings fund, said Deana Healy, vice president of financial planning and advice with Ameriprise. They might say, “Yes, things are perhaps uncertain, but here’s what we’ve done.” If your child asks what all this may mean for your family, it can be a “prime moment” to have a conversation because that will make any potential belt-tightening more understandable, Ms. Maxcy said. “You can say, ‘We’re making some changes,’ instead of all of a sudden saying ‘No’ all the time,” she said. Avoid having money talks with children when you’re stressed, Ms. Maxcy said. If you’re busy and not ready to talk, say you’ll find time to chat when things are quieter. “Maybe don’t have the conversation if you just opened your 401(k) statement,” she quipped. Robin Gurwitch, a psychologist and professor at Duke University Medical Center, recommends broaching the subject with children even if they don’t ask, because they have probably heard about economic concerns, especially if they’re on social media. “You can say: ‘There’s a lot of talk about our economy and tariffs. I’m wondering what you’ve heard about that.’” Once parents understand what the child knows, they can address any concerns or correct misperceptions. Because some teenagers may brush off inquiries from parents, Dr. Gurwitch said, it can help to address their concerns indirectly. Perhaps you can ask, “What do your friends think about this?” If your teenager says her friends are worried they may not be able to buy a dress for prom, she’s probably concerned as well. Then, Dr. Gurwitch said, you can reassure her that the family can afford a new prom dress, if that’s the case or, if money is tight, discuss a budget. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT The overall message to children, she said, should be, “We are here to support you even if things are uncertain or scary.” John Lanza, who has written books about allowances and family finances, said including children in budgeting could help give them some sense of control. “Kids want to be a part of the solution,” Mr. Lanza said. If, for instance, a household goal is to eat at home most nights instead of dining out, make it a game by having children suggest meals and help cook them. And if you can swing it, offer to give your children some of the savings as pocket money. What if I’m not confident in talking about money? Parents may feel that they need to have all the answers, but “it’s fine to admit you’re not an expert,” said Scott Rick, an associate professor of marketing at the University of Michigan’s business school who has studied financial decision making. If your children ask about tariffs, for instance, and you don’t have enough knowledge on the topic, you can encourage their curiosity, and show that it’s all right to ask about money, by offering to research the subject with them. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT “You might say: ‘I’d like to get a better handle on that myself. Can we look into it together?’” Dr. Rick said. Some parents may avoid talking about money with their children because they feel guilt or shame about past financial mistakes, said Yanely Espinal, a financial educator and an author. But it’s smart to talk about money at home “early and often,” she said. Research suggests that education from parents during childhood is linked to healthy financial behaviors in young adults, she said, particularly responsible credit card use. How can I start conversations with my children about money? You probably already have some resources handy. Simply sharing a receipt after going to the store, for instance, can lead to talks about how much things cost, said Cynthia Fitzthum, a financial education expert at St. Cloud State University in Minnesota. Dr. LeBaron-Black’s parents once gathered her and her siblings around a stack of Monopoly money and counted out how much income they made each month, she said. “I thought, ‘That looks like a lot,’” she recalled. Then her parents started subtracting: the amount they spent for the mortgage, heat, electricity and food. By the end, there was still a little left. But the point was made. The family’s needs were covered, but they had to spend wisely. Reading and discussing books, including those not explicitly about money, can start conversations about why characters make the choices they do and how money may have played a role, Ms. Maxcy said. For young children, she suggested “A Bike Like Sergio’s,” about a boy who desperately wants a cool bicycle. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Dr. Fitzthum suggests a book for third to fifth graders, “Beatrice’s Goat,” about a young girl in Uganda who receives a goat and the impact it has on her family. Without using wonky terms, it introduces concepts like income, savings and even opportunity costs — the economic principle that making one choice can mean you miss out on the benefit of making a different one. Kelly Li said she had decided to write the “Little Economists” series of books for children ages 3 to 8 after becoming a mother and learning that many Americans lacked savings. (Ms. Li, who previously worked in finance, wrote the books — with titles like “What Is Money?” and “What Is Inflation?” — under the surname Lee.) The Council for Economic Education, which focuses on economic and financial instruction in kindergarten through high school, offers a free Financial Fun Pack on its website with exercises families can use at home.

People across Asia flocked to shopping malls and online stores Friday as they scrambled to get their hands on the latest edition of Labubu, a collectible toy that has sparked buying frenzies the world over. Inspired by Nordic folklore, the toothy, fluffy figurines — which typically come in palm-sized “blind boxes” — drew crowds in cities from Bangkok, to Kuala Lumpur as the new collection went on sale. They were also made available online, where they quickly sold out. The brainchild of Hong Kong-born, Netherlands-raised illustrator Kasing Lung, Labubu and fellow creatures from his “The Monsters” series have amassed a loyal following since their founding in 2015. But Labubu’s popularity has spiked over the past year, thanks to celebrity endorsements. Lisa, from K-pop mega group Blackpink, has frequently professed her love of the creature on social media. “Labubu is my baby,” she said in a recent Teen Vogue video. Titled “Big Into Energy,” the latest drop features six vinyl plush pendants (and one “secret” figurine) representing “emotions” like love, hope and happiness — each made in new colorways. The new Labubus cost between $13 and $16 each in various Asian countries. Shortly after their release on Friday, some pendants were being resold for up to $90 on US online resell platform StockX. At the CentralWorld shopping mall in Bangkok, dozens of fans lined up before its branch of Pop Mart — Labubu’s licensed distributor — had even opened, despite having pre-registered time slots. University student Kamolwan Pohfah, 21, said she left home early to reach the store because she couldn’t wait to get her hands on the newest collection. “I have been following Labubu for almost two years now,” she told CNN. “It was kind of ugly at first sight. But I kept seeing it on social media. And my friends are crazy about it, so I follow them,” she said. Tourist Emily Jong, 27, who was also in line and visiting from Australia, said she tried her luck at the mall hours before she was due to fly home, but left empty-handed. “We tried to line up but we didn’t know we have to register,” she said. Hathairus Mekborisut, 53, bought a box set of six pendants. She decided to keep one, named “luck,” for herself and to resell the rest. She’s been “longing” for a purple one, she said. Another reseller who goes by her nickname Mai, and wanted to remain anonymous, led a small group to buy up as many as possible. She said she could make double the retail price by reselling them to customers in other countries. Despite recently shooting to global fame, Labubu (who is a girl) has been a decade in the making. She first appeared as a side character, often hiding in the background, in a fairy world created by Lung in his three-part picture book series, “The Monsters,” according to Pop Mart, the Chinese toy company licensed to sell Labubu merchandise. Boasting rabbit-like ears, big round eyes and a mischievous grin, Labubu is “kind-hearted and always wants to help, but often accidentally achieves the opposite,” the company said on its website. Lung, 52, previously told Hong Kong local newspaper Ming Pao that the character was inspired by his childhood, which was filled with Nordic folk tales of elves, trolls and fairies. After moving to the Netherlands as a child, he picked up Dutch through simple picture books. Fans often accessorize their outfits by clipping Labubu plushies onto their clothes or bags (they were even spotted at Paris Fashion Week last month). The figurines are also taken to fan-led meet-ups or posted on online marketplaces, where they are traded and resold. Pop Mart, a Chinese toymaker that has made its mark in a collectibles market traditionally dominated by Japan, has found success in selling Labubus in a blind-box format — which makes contents a mystery until opened, adding to their appeal. “The Monsters” series is its best-selling franchise, and last year generated 3 billion yuan ($410 million) in sales. Videos of young fans anxiously unboxing the figurines, and erupting into joy — or sometimes disappointment — have flooded social media platforms like TikTok. And celebrities like Rihanna and Blackpink’s Rosé have only added to the hype. On Wednesday, Blackpink’s Lisa showed off her new pink and yellow tie-dye furry Labubu, from the latest release, in an Instagram story. She revealed herself as a fan about a year ago, when a photo of the star hugging a large Labubu in a camping costume went viral. Her endorsement is widely credited with fueling the toy’s popularity, particularly in Southeast Asia, which is Pop Mart’s largest — and fastest growing — overseas market. Last year, the Chinese toymaker’s annual revenues in the region grew by 619% to over 2.4 billion yuan ($309 million). A fan base is also growing in the US, though American buyers will have to pay more for their purchases amid a trade war between China and the US, which has hit most Chinese imports with a 145% tariff. (China retaliated with a 125% tariff.) A blind box from the latest series, which also went on sale in the US on Friday, is priced at $27.99, up from $21.99 for the previous series. Among the new Labubus being released is a rare one labeled “Secret,” which buyers have just a 1-in-72- chance of unboxing. “It’s quite fun. If you do get the secret ones, you do get the dopamine,” said 27-year-old collector Lawrence Yu, who lives in Melbourne, Australia and has so far spent $1,200 Australian dollars ($763) on over two dozen Labubus, ranging from ones found in “blind boxes” to plush toys. He recalled arriving ahead of a drop at a local mall, where a new Pop Mart store had opened last October, at 2:30 a.m, before spending 10 hours in line. “I hope it comes to Melbourne soon,” he said in a video call, referring to the new series, which will not be released in physical stores in Australia until the end of this month.

In the balmy late afternoon of Aug. 25, 2024, Sushil and Radhika Chetal were house-hunting in Danbury, Conn., in an upscale neighborhood of manicured yards and heated pools. Sushil, a vice president at Morgan Stanley in New York, was in the driver’s seat of a new matte gray Lamborghini Urus, an S.U.V. with a price tag starting around $240,000. As they turned a corner, the Lamborghini was suddenly rammed from behind by a white Honda Civic. At the same time, a white Ram ProMaster work van cut in front, trapping the Chetals. According to a criminal complaint filed after the incident, a group of six men dressed in black and wearing masks emerged from their vehicles and forced the Chetals from their car, dragging them toward the van’s open side door. When Sushil resisted, the assailants hit him with a baseball bat and threatened to kill him. The men bound the couple’s arms and legs with duct tape. They forced Radhika to lie face down and told her not to look at them, even as she struggled to breathe, pleading that she had asthma. They wrapped Sushil’s face with duct tape and hit him several more times with the bat as the van peeled off. Several witnesses saw the attack and called 911. Some of them, including an off-duty F.B.I. agent who lived nearby and happened to be at the scene, trailed the van and the Honda, relaying the vehicles’ movements to the police. The F.B.I. agent managed to obtain partial license plate numbers. Danbury police officers soon located the van. A patrol vehicle activated its emergency lights and tried to make a stop, but the driver of the van accelerated, swerving recklessly through traffic. About a mile from where the chase began, the driver careered off the road and struck a curb. Four suspects fled on foot. The police found one hiding under a bridge and apprehended him after a brief chase. Within a couple of hours, the other three were located hiding in a wooded area nearby. The police, meanwhile, found the shaken Chetals bound in the back of the van. Detective Sgt. Steve Castrovinci of the Danbury Police Department had the day off when the shift commander called him at home about the incident. “We got a kidnapping, a legit kidnapping,” he remembers the shift commander telling him. Castrovinci called a few of his detectives to get up to speed and then stopped at the crime scene before driving to the station to speak to the suspects. Based on information provided by one of the suspects in custody, two more assailants were found and arrested the following morning at an Airbnb rental in Roxbury, a 30-minute drive from Danbury, where the white Civic was also parked. For Castrovinci, it was a strange and dramatic case. Danbury is a well-off, quiet place, and while the police there did get the odd kidnapping case, they were almost always related to child custody. A violent midday abduction was unheard-of. There was no apparent connection between the suspects and the Chetals, and, stranger still, law enforcement discovered that the suspects — men between the ages of 18 and 26 — had traveled to Connecticut all the way from Miami. They’d rented the van on the app Turo. “This is a case — you may only get one of these, one or two of these, in a career,” Castrovinci, who has been in law enforcement for 20 years, including five with the New York Police Department, told me. “Not in this area. We don’t deal with stuff like this.” For weeks, the police said very little. Castrovinci and his team worked to piece together a motive. It was hard to believe that the Chetals were targeted because of Sushil’s senior position at an investment bank. As a vice president at Morgan Stanley, he would have had an enviable salary, but nothing out of the ordinary for Danbury. And if money was the kidnappers’ motive, it was bizarre that they left behind the Chetals’ Lamborghini, which was found abandoned in the woods. None of it seemed quite right. A few days after the attempted kidnapping, though, Castrovinci says his team received a tip from the F.B.I. that cast the case in a strange new light: a possible connection to an enormous cryptocurrency heist, one that happened just a week before the attack. A group of young men, some of whom connected on a Minecraft server, were suspected of taking a quarter of a billion dollars from an unwitting victim, setting off an incredible chain of events that involved an online network of cybercriminals, some of them teenagers; a group of independent digital detectives who track their efforts; and several law-enforcement agencies. Now, it seemed, the whole thing had culminated in the kidnapping of the Chetals — a real-world spillover from the brazen lawlessness of this expanding digital underworld and the culture that surrounds it. The chain of events began a couple of weeks earlier when a resident of Washington, D.C., began receiving suspicious sign-in notifications on his Google account. The logins appeared as though they were coming from overseas. Then on Aug. 18, he received a phone call from someone claiming to be on Google’s security team. The caller said the user’s email account had been compromised. The call appeared to be legitimate — the caller knew the D.C. resident’s personal information. The account holder, the caller said, would need to shut down his account unless he could verify certain personal information over the phone, which he did. Shortly after the call with the supposed Google agent, the same D.C. resident, whose identity remains concealed in federal court documents, received a second call from someone who said they were a security-team representative from Gemini, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange. Like the supposed Google employee, he had the man’s personal information; he explained that his Gemini account, which held about $4.5 million worth of coins, had been hacked and that the man needed to reset his two-factor authentication and transfer the Bitcoin in his account to another wallet to keep it safe. The person on the phone then suggested that the account holder download a program that would provide additional security. The man agreed, not knowing that he was downloading a remote-desktop app, which would give the caller access to his computer — and access to a second crypto account, exposing him to an even more staggering theft. It turned out that the D.C. resident, an early investor in cryptocurrency, had more than 4,100 Bitcoin in total. Ten years ago, that much Bitcoin was worth about $1 million; that day, it was worth more than $243 million. Within minutes, it was all gone. A central paradox of crypto is that, although coin owners are generally not identifiable, transactions are recorded on a public ledger known as a blockchain. This means that when the currency moves, anyone can see it. This paradox has enabled a new class of sleuths who can identify suspicious transactions on the blockchain. One of the best of these digital detectives goes by the handle ZachXBT, an independent investigator of crypto-related crimes. ZachXBT is a well-known and elusive figure in the crypto world. He regularly posts threads detailing his investigations on X, where he has about 850,000 followers, exposing supposed wrongdoers, sometimes by name. Often, he shares his findings with law enforcement. Wired described him as “the most prolific independent crypto-focused detective in the world.” He doesn’t share his real identity online. Minutes after the D.C. resident’s funds were liquidated, ZachXBT was walking through the airport on his way to catch a flight when he received an alert on his phone about an unusual transaction. Crypto investigators use tools to monitor the global flows of various coins and set alerts for, say, any transaction over $100,000 that goes through certain exchanges that charge a premium for having few security safeguards. The initial alert that day was for a mid-six-figure transaction, followed by higher amounts, all the way up to $2 million. After he cleared airport security, ZachXBT sat down, opened his laptop and began tracing transactions back to a Bitcoin wallet with roughly $240 million in crypto. Some of the Bitcoin in the wallet dated back to 2012. “At that point it didn’t make sense,” he told me. “Why is a person who held their Bitcoin for this long using a sketchy service that typically sees a lot of illicit funds flow through it?” He added the wallets associated with the transactions to his tracking and boarded the plane. Once he connected to in-flight internet, more alerts arrived. Throughout the day, the Bitcoin traced to the wallet was being liquidated through more than 15 different high-fee cryptocurrency services. After he landed, ZachXBT messaged a few other investigators who specialize in cryptocurrency theft. Among them was Josh Cooper-Duckett, director of investigations for Cryptoforensic Investigators, one of a growing number of independent firms that track crypto theft and fraud and help law enforcement recover currency for the victims. Cooper-Duckett, a 26-year-old from London, developed an early interest in crypto, and after working in security at Deloitte for three and a half years, started investigating crypto theft, focusing on cases where the financial loss is at least $100,000, of which there are a lot these days. ZachXBT told Cooper-Duckett and the other investigators what he discovered, and they all agreed it was suspicious to see a quarter-billion-dollar wallet liquidated this way. “Somebody like that, that has that much money, does not wake up one day on the weekend and decide, Well, I’m just going to start sending to a bunch of exchanges and trying to convert for Monero and Ethereum — they don’t do that.” The crypto investigators contacted the exchanges and services to inform them of the theft so they could freeze the currency and coordinate with the authorities. Some did; others didn’t. “In this case, it was a lot of Whac-a-Mole,” Cooper-Duckett says. “They’re trying a lot of different exchanges, a lot of different services to see what works. I mean, they have $240 million to launder. That’s a lot of money.” On X, ZachXBT notified his followers about the heist in progress. “Seven hours ago a suspicious transfer was made from a potential victim for 4064 BTC ($238M),” he wrote. Funds were transferred to THORChain, eXch, KuCoin, ChangeNOW, RAILGUN and Avalanche Bridge, all crypto services. ZachXBT noticed that the victim had received bankruptcy payouts from Genesis, a lending platform, which filed for bankruptcy in 2023, related to the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. Using his network, he was eventually able to connect with the victim over email. The shocked D.C. resident hired ZachXBT, Cryptoforensic and another crypto investigation firm to help track his stolen funds. That same day, he filed a police report with the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, and ZachXBT messaged his contacts in law enforcement. (The F.B.I. and the Department of Justice declined to comment for this article.) Cryptocurrency theft is growing at such a rate that federal investigators struggle to keep up. According to its latest report, the Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 69,000 claims in 2023 regarding financial fraud involving crypto, resulting in more than $5.6 billion in reported losses, a 45 percent increase from 2022. Although just 10 percent of all financial fraud complaints were crypto-related, the losses associated with those complaints accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total. Cryptocurrency’s decentralized nature, the irreversibility of transactions and the ability to move digital coins around the world make it appealing to criminals and difficult for the F.B.I. to recover funds, the report said. In 2022, the F.B.I. created a special unit to combat crypto theft, called the Virtual Assets Unit (V.A.U.). Because of the scale of the crimes and the difficulty combating them, government agencies — including the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, even the I.R.S. — rely on private firms and individuals who have a deep knowledge of the digital criminal underground, experts say. “Josh and Zach, they’re so good and so fast at the tracing,” says Nick Bax, founder of the cryptocurrency analysis firm Five I’s. Bax has worked with ZachXBT on several cases but has never seen his face; in their early meetings, ZachXBT used a voice-altering software that made him sound like Mickey Mouse. “Like, I’m very good, but they’re — I will never be as good as them,” Bax says. “And I think their brains are, like, legitimately altered, because they started doing this at a young age.” Crypto investigators use fake accounts to immerse themselves in the forums where cybercriminals gather — Telegram, Discord and other platforms — to plot and brag about their exploits. The thieves are generally young and cavalier and sometimes leave a trail of clues in their wake. After ZachXBT’s X post about the heist, a source reached out to him through a throwaway account with potential clues about the identities of the thieves. The source sent ZachXBT several screen-share recordings, which he said were taken when one of the scammers livestreamed the heist for a group of his friends. The videos, which totaled an hour and a half, included the call with the victim. One clip featured the scammers’ live reaction when they realized they’d successfully stolen $243 million worth of the D.C. resident’s Bitcoin. A voice can be heard yelling: “Oh, my god! Oh, my god! $243 million! Yes! Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Bro!” In private chats they used screen names like Swag, $$$ and Meech, but they made a crucial mistake. One of them flashed his Windows home screen, which revealed his real name in the start icon pop-up at the bottom of the screen: Veer Chetal, an 18-year-old from Danbury — the son of the couple who were kidnapped. A quiet honor student who had recently graduated from Immaculate High School in Danbury, Veer Chetal was about to begin studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2022, he completed a “future lawyers” program, and a story that year on the Immaculate website showed a photo of a smiling kid with glasses wearing a Tommy Hilfiger windbreaker over a red polo. Classmates remember Chetal as shy and a fan of cars. “He just kind of kept to himself,” says Marco Dias, who became friends with Chetal junior year. According to another classmate named Nick Paris, this was true of Chetal until one day in the middle of his senior year, when he showed up at school driving a Corvette. “He just parked in the lot. It was 7:30 a.m., and everyone was like, What?” Paris says. Soon Chetal rolled up in a BMW, and then a Lamborghini Urus. He started wearing Louis Vuitton shirts and Gucci shoes, and on Senior Skip Day, while Paris and many of his classmates went to a nearby mall, Chetal took some friends, including Dias, to New York to party on a yacht he had rented, where they took photos holding wads of cash. Chetal said that he had made his money trading crypto; Dias says Chetal showed him trades on his phone as proof one morning during homeroom class. Once, Chetal rented a large house in Stamford, Conn., and hosted a three-day gathering with friends. “I was in the basement at one point, and I was just messing around with my friends, and I just see him, like, just on the couch, just like on his phone, pretty much avoiding everyone at the party,” Dias says. “And I thought, Oh, that’s kind of weird.” Paris remembers that during a school parade, the police stopped Chetal in his Lamborghini Urus for a traffic violation. “He literally called his lawyer on the spot before answering the cops’ questions, which everyone was like: Wow, this guy’s got, like, something going for him. Like, this guy’s got serious money.” Independent investigators say Chetal was secretly a member of the Com, also referred to as the Comm or the Community, an online network of chat groups that has its roots in the hacking underground of the 1980s and functions as a kind of social network for cybercriminals or aspiring ones. In an affidavit from an unrelated case, an F.B.I. agent described the Com as “a geographically diverse group of individuals, organized in various subgroups, all of whom coordinate through online communication applications such as Discord and Telegram to engage in various types of criminal activity.” According to the F.B.I. affidavit and experts who study the Com, the various subgroups’ activities include swatting, which entails making false reports to emergency services or institutions like schools to trigger a police response; SIM swapping, when hackers take over a target’s phone number, sometimes by tricking customer-service representatives; ransomware attacks, using a malware that denies users or organizers access to computer files; cryptocurrency theft; and corporate intrusions. Allison Nixon, the chief research officer of Unit 221B, a collective of cybersecurity experts, has been following this growing corner of the internet since 2011 and is widely considered to be a pre-eminent expert on the Com. She says most Com members are young men from Western countries. In group chats, many talk about college and taking classes in cybersecurity, which they use to their advantage, she says. The gateway for many is through video games like RuneScape, Roblox and Grand Theft Auto. By the mid-2010s, a more sinister world was also blossoming within Minecraft — the creative building game — facilitated by the advent of online servers, owned and operated by users, that allowed gamers to kill one another in teams, or “factions.” On these servers, Minecraft evolved into a highly competitive battle zone. With that came opportunities to monetize and scam. Servers soon began to introduce in-game purchases that gave players upgrades, like the ability to fly and to fight with more powerful weapons and armor. Other in-game purchases bought users stylish character outfits, which were wielded to show status online. As players gravitated toward these competitive servers, a large black market for in-game items and valuable user names started to blossom on Discord. With Minecraft dominated by young players, the black market became ripe for fraud. Users agreed to trade in-game items for real money via PayPal, but once the money was received, scammers would block the user’s account. This became so rampant that people started advertising themselves as verified middlemen who would take both the money and the in-game item and then hand it off to each party for a fee. One prized possession in this world is high-value user names, often no more than four letters — such as Tree, OK, Mark, YOLO or G, any of which could go for upward of $10,000. As faction-based servers and the Minecraft black market thrived, so did cryptocurrencies, which eventually supplanted PayPal on these servers. It was this combination of a consequence-free training ground for competition, gambling and fraud, with a growing familiarity with crypto, that turned Minecraft servers into a cesspool for budding cybercriminals. When the price of Bitcoin began to rise rapidly in 2017, Com members made an easy shift from Minecraft fraud to crypto theft. One of the popular Com forums was called “OGUsers.” It was initially dedicated to discussing and buying social media accounts and user names, but it evolved into a platform for cybercrime, including SIM swapping and Twitter account hijackings. “Very, very quickly these antisocial communities turned into overnight millionaires and propagated this culture, because people notice when other people turn into millionaires overnight, and they want to learn how they did that,” Nixon explains. “The size of the Com exploded.” A common tactic used by the Com today to steal cryptocurrency is what’s called social engineering, which entails manipulating users into divulging sensitive information. Com members put together long lists of potential victims, obtained through data breaches, and then directly target them, which is what occurred in the case of the D.C. victim. They will sometimes post job listings online to recruit people to help them with their schemes. One listing posted on Telegram that Nick Bax, the crypto investigator, shared with me promised “5f a week” — that is, five figures — “if ur not slow” to phone potential targets. “American professional customer service voice is required,” it read. Sometimes, Com members will then return to the Minecraft black market to launder their stolen crypto by buying valuable game items and selling the items for real dollars using PayPal. After ZachXBT had Veer Chetal’s name, it didn’t take long for him and other investigators to figure out the identities of others involved in the crypto heist. In the recordings ZachXBT obtained, the thieves referred to one another by their Com aliases, but also in some cases by their real first names. One name frequently uttered was Malone. This was Malone Lam, a known figure in the Com who went by the aliases Greavys and Anne Hathaway. Lam was a 20-year-old from Singapore and a notorious Minecraft player with bangs roughly chopped at his eye line. He had been banned from Minecraft servers only to maneuver his way back in. In the spring of 2023, when he got into a minor disagreement with the managers of the server Minecadia that resulted in him losing in-game items, he doxxed the staff, releasing their addresses and Social Security numbers online and, in at least one case, sending emergency services to their house, according to several users and Discord chats from the time. It was within Minecraft that Chetal and Lam first connected, playing together on a faction led by Lam. In October 2023, Lam arrived in the United States on a 90-day visa. He had largely stopped playing Minecraft. According to court documents, he began funding his lifestyle with other crypto-related fraud. After the August 2024 crypto heist, ZachXBT was able to track Lam through what’s called OSINT — open-source intelligence. In other words, social media. In Com chat groups, word was spreading that Lam was on a wild spending spree. Nobody seemed to know the source of his money, but they spoke of his lavish exploits at Los Angeles nightclubs. ZachXBT researched the most popular nightclubs in the city and then searched Instagram stories from partyers and the clubs themselves. In one post, Malone was filmed wearing a white Moncler jacket and what appeared to be diamond rings and diamond-encrusted sunglasses. He stood up on the table and began showering the crowd with hundred-dollar bills. As money rained down, servers paraded in $1,500 bottles of Champagne topped with sparklers and held up signs that read “@Malone.” He spent $569,528 in one evening alone. At one nightclub, Lam and his crew trolled ZachXBT, getting clubgoers to hold up signs reading “TOLD U WE’D WIN,” while another read, “[Expletive] ZACHXBT.” Over the course of a few weeks, Lam bought 31 automobiles, including custom Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Porsches, some valued as high as $3 million. On Aug. 24, he apparently sent a photo of a pink Lamborghini to a model. “I got you a present, we’ll call it an early birthday gift,” he texted her. She wrote back, “I am taken once again.” He replied, “idc” — I don’t care. On Sept. 10, after a 23-day party spree in Los Angeles, Lam headed to Miami on a private jet with a group of friends. There, he rented multiple homes, including a 10-bedroom, $7.5 million estate. Within a few days, Lam had filled the driveway with more luxury cars, including multiple Lamborghinis, one with the name “Malone” printed on the side. Every few days, ZachXBT sent the intelligence he’d collected to law enforcement. The information generally flowed one way, but federal authorities were conducting their own investigation simultaneously. According to court filings, the supposed co-conspirators used sophisticated money-laundering methods to hide the funds and mask their identities, using crypto exchanges like eXch, which does not require personal customer information, and VPN connections that disguise their locations. But in at least one instance, according to the authorities, one of them was sloppy, neglecting to use a VPN when he created an account with TradeOgre, a digital currency exchange, which connected to an I.P. address that was registered to a $47,500-per-month rental home in Encino, Calif. It was leased to Jeandiel Serrano, 21, who went by VersaceGod, @SkidStar and Box online. By the time the authorities identified Serrano, he was on vacation in the Maldives with his girlfriend. On Sept. 18, Serrano flew back from the Maldives to Los Angeles International Airport, where the authorities were waiting for him. He was wearing a $500,000 watch at the time of his arrest. Serrano initially denied knowledge of the theft and agreed to speak with law enforcement without a lawyer. But he soon acknowledged his involvement, according to court reports, specifically to impersonating a Gemini employee. Serrano admitted that he owned five cars, two of which were gifts from one of his co-conspirators, given to him with proceeds from a previous fraud. He also confessed to having access to approximately $20 million of the victim’s crypto on his phone and agreed to transfer the funds back to the F.B.I. At the same time, agents in Miami were preparing to raid one of Lam’s rented mansions. Lam knew it was coming: Immediately after Serrano’s arrest, Serrano’s girlfriend called to warn his co-conspirators. They then deleted their Telegram accounts and other incriminating evidence from their phones. Later that day, a team of F.B.I. agents working with the Miami police raided a mansion near Miami Shores. Agents blew open the front metal gate while another group entered by boat via a small saltwater canal in the rear. The sound of flashbangs rang in the neighborhood as the agents entered the home. Moments later, an agent escorted a handcuffed Lam, who wore a long-sleeve white top, maroon basketball shorts and sneakers, as smoke hung in the air, followed by at least five other people who were in the house with him. Serrano and Lam were charged with money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They face up to 20 years in prison for each charge. Exactly one month after the heist, the party was over. In Danbury, in the days and weeks after the kidnapping of the Chetals, Castrovinci and the police worked with federal investigators to build cases against the group from Florida. They obtained emergency access to the suspects’ phones, where they could view group chat exchanges and record the groups’ movements. They learned that the trip was organized and paid for in part by Angel Borrero, a 23-year-old from Miami who went by Chi Chi. In the group conversation, Borrero wrote to the others, “If this go good we out to Cali next,” which federal investigators took to mean the group was planning something else in California. The same day, Josue Alberto Romero, who used the nickname Sway, sent a message to the group: “Chichi we are more ready than ever.” The chats indicated that the group began coordinating as early as 7 a.m. and spent part of the afternoon surveilling the Chetals. By then, the authorities had established a motive: The men, the police believed, had targeted the Chetals to hold them ransom for the money their son had. Independent investigators think that at least one member of the group, Reynaldo (Rey) Diaz, who they say went by the alias Pantic, was a member of the Com; ZachXBT speculates that the thieves might have made themselves targets by sharing stories of their spending with other Com members. “You would think you commit a crime, you would shut up and keep to yourselves,” he says. “But they kind of have to compensate, showing off to their friends — who they think are their friends. But they might not be their friends.” On Aug. 27, Danbury police filed charges against the six suspects in the case: multiple counts of first-degree assault, first-degree kidnapping and reckless endangerment. Federal charges followed. On Sept. 24, a grand-jury indictment filed in Federal District Court in Connecticut charged the six Florida men with kidnapping, carjacking and conspiracy crimes. The six Florida men reflect a growing faction of the Com, those less interested in online schemes and more concerned with using brute force. Diaz was himself shot in Florida two years earlier when he was the target of a robbery attempt. In the F.B.I. affidavit, an agent said the Com regularly commits “brickings, shootings and firebomb attacks.” In 2022, according to reporting from Brian Krebs, an independent investigative journalist, a young man who went by the moniker Foreshadow was kidnapped and beaten by a rival SIM-swapping gang and held for a $200,000 ransom. In October 2023, a 22-year-old named Patrick McGovern-Allen of Egg Harbor Township, N.J., was sentenced to 13 years in prison for participating in violence-for-hire jobs after being contracted by a group of cybercriminals. Last November, it was reported that the chief executive of a Toronto-based crypto company was kidnapped and held for a $1 million ransom. A few weeks later, after a 13-year-old known as the Gen Z Quant Kid created a crypto coin and inflated its value, the crypto community responded by doxxing him and his family and, it is rumored, kidnapping his dog. In January this year, a founder of the French crypto company Ledger was kidnapped with his wife; the kidnappers mutilated his hand and demanded a multimillion-dollar ransom in cryptocurrency. But increasingly, people who have nothing to do with the Com are being targeted, says Nixon, the researcher. Some alleged Com members participate in what are known as harm groups, whose members coerce young women and girls into committing acts of self-harm and violence. Seven years ago, Nixon says, there were maybe a few dozen people in the Com worth being concerned about; today, there are thousands. “Right now,” she says, “we are seeing an evolution from disorganized crime to organized crime, and we are somewhere in the middle point of that.” The twin episodes — the crypto heist and the kidnapping — suggest that the complete lawlessness of Com members’ online lives allowed them to imagine that they could get away with similar exploits in the real world. “I don’t think they really learn,” ZachXBT says. “I’ve seen a lot of them, after they either get either arrested, have assets seized, et cetera — I see a lot of them go back to what they were doing before.” This year, five of the six Florida men pleaded guilty to federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges. They could face 15 years in prison. In a Hartford court in January, 19-year-old Michael Rivas apologized for his actions, calling them “dumb” and saying he was helping another man carry out a “vendetta,” although he didn’t elaborate. In February, a 22-year-old Georgia man named James Schwab was indicted in connection with the kidnapping plot. According to the federal criminal complaint, Schwab had an altercation with Veer Chetal in a Miami nightclub a month before the kidnapping, and he helped fund the plot and arrange transportation and lodging for the attackers. He pleaded not guilty. On March 25, ZachXBT posted a new message to his original thread on X chronicling his investigation into the stolen crypto. “Update: Wiz (Veer Chetal) was arrested,” he wrote. “Here is his mug shot.” The photo attached featured a young man in a white T-shirt with bushy hair, a dark beard, a downturned mouth and exhausted eyes. He bore little resemblance to the kid pictured on the Immaculate High School website. The charge listed in jail records is a federal misdemeanor offense but doesn’t specify what that offense is. According to ZachXBT, the stolen Bitcoin he traced to addresses belonging to Chetal is now in a wallet controlled by law enforcement. The matte gray Lamborghini Urus — the one that Sushil and Radhika Chetal were driving the day of the kidnapping — is still sitting as evidence in a secure police lot in Danbury. It’s the same Lamborghini their son once drove to school.

In the balmy late afternoon of Aug. 25, 2024, Sushil and Radhika Chetal were house-hunting in Danbury, Conn., in an upscale neighborhood of manicured yards and heated pools. Sushil, a vice president at Morgan Stanley in New York, was in the driver’s seat of a new matte gray Lamborghini Urus, an S.U.V. with a price tag starting around $240,000. As they turned a corner, the Lamborghini was suddenly rammed from behind by a white Honda Civic. At the same time, a white Ram ProMaster work van cut in front, trapping the Chetals. According to a criminal complaint filed after the incident, a group of six men dressed in black and wearing masks emerged from their vehicles and forced the Chetals from their car, dragging them toward the van’s open side door. When Sushil resisted, the assailants hit him with a baseball bat and threatened to kill him. The men bound the couple’s arms and legs with duct tape. They forced Radhika to lie face down and told her not to look at them, even as she struggled to breathe, pleading that she had asthma. They wrapped Sushil’s face with duct tape and hit him several more times with the bat as the van peeled off. Several witnesses saw the attack and called 911. Some of them, including an off-duty F.B.I. agent who lived nearby and happened to be at the scene, trailed the van and the Honda, relaying the vehicles’ movements to the police. The F.B.I. agent managed to obtain partial license plate numbers. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Danbury police officers soon located the van. A patrol vehicle activated its emergency lights and tried to make a stop, but the driver of the van accelerated, swerving recklessly through traffic. About a mile from where the chase began, the driver careered off the road and struck a curb. Four suspects fled on foot. The police found one hiding under a bridge and apprehended him after a brief chase. Within a couple of hours, the other three were located hiding in a wooded area nearby. The police, meanwhile, found the shaken Chetals bound in the back of the van. Detective Sgt. Steve Castrovinci of the Danbury Police Department had the day off when the shift commander called him at home about the incident. “We got a kidnapping, a legit kidnapping,” he remembers the shift commander telling him. Castrovinci called a few of his detectives to get up to speed and then stopped at the crime scene before driving to the station to speak to the suspects. Based on information provided by one of the suspects in custody, two more assailants were found and arrested the following morning at an Airbnb rental in Roxbury, a 30-minute drive from Danbury, where the white Civic was also parked. For Castrovinci, it was a strange and dramatic case. Danbury is a well-off, quiet place, and while the police there did get the odd kidnapping case, they were almost always related to child custody. A violent midday abduction was unheard-of. There was no apparent connection between the suspects and the Chetals, and, stranger still, law enforcement discovered that the suspects — men between the ages of 18 and 26 — had traveled to Connecticut all the way from Miami. They’d rented the van on the app Turo. “This is a case — you may only get one of these, one or two of these, in a career,” Castrovinci, who has been in law enforcement for 20 years, including five with the New York Police Department, told me. “Not in this area. We don’t deal with stuff like this.” For weeks, the police said very little. Castrovinci and his team worked to piece together a motive. It was hard to believe that the Chetals were targeted because of Sushil’s senior position at an investment bank. As a vice president at Morgan Stanley, he would have had an enviable salary, but nothing out of the ordinary for Danbury. And if money was the kidnappers’ motive, it was bizarre that they left behind the Chetals’ Lamborghini, which was found abandoned in the woods. None of it seemed quite right. A few days after the attempted kidnapping, though, Castrovinci says his team received a tip from the F.B.I. that cast the case in a strange new light: a possible connection to an enormous cryptocurrency heist, one that happened just a week before the attack. A group of young men, some of whom connected on a Minecraft server, were suspected of taking a quarter of a billion dollars from an unwitting victim, setting off an incredible chain of events that involved an online network of cybercriminals, some of them teenagers; a group of independent digital detectives who track their efforts; and several law-enforcement agencies. Now, it seemed, the whole thing had culminated in the kidnapping of the Chetals — a real-world spillover from the brazen lawlessness of this expanding digital underworld and the culture that surrounds it. The chain of events began a couple of weeks earlier when a resident of Washington, D.C., began receiving suspicious sign-in notifications on his Google account. The logins appeared as though they were coming from overseas. Then on Aug. 18, he received a phone call from someone claiming to be on Google’s security team. The caller said the user’s email account had been compromised. The call appeared to be legitimate — the caller knew the D.C. resident’s personal information. The account holder, the caller said, would need to shut down his account unless he could verify certain personal information over the phone, which he did. Shortly after the call with the supposed Google agent, the same D.C. resident, whose identity remains concealed in federal court documents, received a second call from someone who said they were a security-team representative from Gemini, a prominent cryptocurrency exchange. Like the supposed Google employee, he had the man’s personal information; he explained that his Gemini account, which held about $4.5 million worth of coins, had been hacked and that the man needed to reset his two-factor authentication and transfer the Bitcoin in his account to another wallet to keep it safe. The person on the phone then suggested that the account holder download a program that would provide additional security. The man agreed, not knowing that he was downloading a remote-desktop app, which would give the caller access to his computer — and access to a second crypto account, exposing him to an even more staggering theft. It turned out that the D.C. resident, an early investor in cryptocurrency, had more than 4,100 Bitcoin in total. Ten years ago, that much Bitcoin was worth about $1 million; that day, it was worth more than $243 million. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT Within minutes, it was all gone. A central paradox of crypto is that, although coin owners are generally not identifiable, transactions are recorded on a public ledger known as a blockchain. This means that when the currency moves, anyone can see it. This paradox has enabled a new class of sleuths who can identify suspicious transactions on the blockchain. One of the best of these digital detectives goes by the handle ZachXBT, an independent investigator of crypto-related crimes. ZachXBT is a well-known and elusive figure in the crypto world. He regularly posts threads detailing his investigations on X, where he has about 850,000 followers, exposing supposed wrongdoers, sometimes by name. Often, he shares his findings with law enforcement. Wired described him as “the most prolific independent crypto-focused detective in the world.” He doesn’t share his real identity online. Minutes after the D.C. resident’s funds were liquidated, ZachXBT was walking through the airport on his way to catch a flight when he received an alert on his phone about an unusual transaction. Crypto investigators use tools to monitor the global flows of various coins and set alerts for, say, any transaction over $100,000 that goes through certain exchanges that charge a premium for having few security safeguards. The initial alert that day was for a mid-six-figure transaction, followed by higher amounts, all the way up to $2 million. After he cleared airport security, ZachXBT sat down, opened his laptop and began tracing transactions back to a Bitcoin wallet with roughly $240 million in crypto. Some of the Bitcoin in the wallet dated back to 2012. “At that point it didn’t make sense,” he told me. “Why is a person who held their Bitcoin for this long using a sketchy service that typically sees a lot of illicit funds flow through it?” He added the wallets associated with the transactions to his tracking and boarded the plane. Once he connected to in-flight internet, more alerts arrived. Throughout the day, the Bitcoin traced to the wallet was being liquidated through more than 15 different high-fee cryptocurrency services. After he landed, ZachXBT messaged a few other investigators who specialize in cryptocurrency theft. Among them was Josh Cooper-Duckett, director of investigations for Cryptoforensic Investigators, one of a growing number of independent firms that track crypto theft and fraud and help law enforcement recover currency for the victims. Cooper-Duckett, a 26-year-old from London, developed an early interest in crypto, and after working in security at Deloitte for three and a half years, started investigating crypto theft, focusing on cases where the financial loss is at least $100,000, of which there are a lot these days. ZachXBT told Cooper-Duckett and the other investigators what he discovered, and they all agreed it was suspicious to see a quarter-billion-dollar wallet liquidated this way. “Somebody like that, that has that much money, does not wake up one day on the weekend and decide, Well, I’m just going to start sending to a bunch of exchanges and trying to convert for Monero and Ethereum — they don’t do that.” The crypto investigators contacted the exchanges and services to inform them of the theft so they could freeze the currency and coordinate with the authorities. Some did; others didn’t. “In this case, it was a lot of Whac-a-Mole,” Cooper-Duckett says. “They’re trying a lot of different exchanges, a lot of different services to see what works. I mean, they have $240 million to launder. That’s a lot of money.” On X, ZachXBT notified his followers about the heist in progress. “Seven hours ago a suspicious transfer was made from a potential victim for 4064 BTC ($238M),” he wrote. Funds were transferred to THORChain, eXch, KuCoin, ChangeNOW, RAILGUN and Avalanche Bridge, all crypto services. ZachXBT noticed that the victim had received bankruptcy payouts from Genesis, a lending platform, which filed for bankruptcy in 2023, related to the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX. Using his network, he was eventually able to connect with the victim over email. The shocked D.C. resident hired ZachXBT, Cryptoforensic and another crypto investigation firm to help track his stolen funds. That same day, he filed a police report with the F.B.I.’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, and ZachXBT messaged his contacts in law enforcement. (The F.B.I. and the Department of Justice declined to comment for this article.) Cryptocurrency theft is growing at such a rate that federal investigators struggle to keep up. According to its latest report, the Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 69,000 claims in 2023 regarding financial fraud involving crypto, resulting in more than $5.6 billion in reported losses, a 45 percent increase from 2022. Although just 10 percent of all financial fraud complaints were crypto-related, the losses associated with those complaints accounted for nearly 50 percent of the total. Cryptocurrency’s decentralized nature, the irreversibility of transactions and the ability to move digital coins around the world make it appealing to criminals and difficult for the F.B.I. to recover funds, the report said. In 2022, the F.B.I. created a special unit to combat crypto theft, called the Virtual Assets Unit (V.A.U.). Because of the scale of the crimes and the difficulty combating them, government agencies — including the F.B.I., the Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, even the I.R.S. — rely on private firms and individuals who have a deep knowledge of the digital criminal underground, experts say. “Josh and Zach, they’re so good and so fast at the tracing,” says Nick Bax, founder of the cryptocurrency analysis firm Five I’s. Bax has worked with ZachXBT on several cases but has never seen his face; in their early meetings, ZachXBT used a voice-altering software that made him sound like Mickey Mouse. “Like, I’m very good, but they’re — I will never be as good as them,” Bax says. “And I think their brains are, like, legitimately altered, because they started doing this at a young age.” Crypto investigators use fake accounts to immerse themselves in the forums where cybercriminals gather — Telegram, Discord and other platforms — to plot and brag about their exploits. The thieves are generally young and cavalier and sometimes leave a trail of clues in their wake. After ZachXBT’s X post about the heist, a source reached out to him through a throwaway account with potential clues about the identities of the thieves. The source sent ZachXBT several screen-share recordings, which he said were taken when one of the scammers livestreamed the heist for a group of his friends. The videos, which totaled an hour and a half, included the call with the victim. One clip featured the scammers’ live reaction when they realized they’d successfully stolen $243 million worth of the D.C. resident’s Bitcoin. A voice can be heard yelling: “Oh, my god! Oh, my god! $243 million! Yes! Oh, my god! Oh, my god! Bro!” In private chats they used screen names like Swag, $$$ and Meech, but they made a crucial mistake. One of them flashed his Windows home screen, which revealed his real name in the start icon pop-up at the bottom of the screen: Veer Chetal, an 18-year-old from Danbury — the son of the couple who were kidnapped. A quiet honor student who had recently graduated from Immaculate High School in Danbury, Veer Chetal was about to begin studying at Rutgers University in New Jersey. In 2022, he completed a “future lawyers” program, and a story that year on the Immaculate website showed a photo of a smiling kid with glasses wearing a Tommy Hilfiger windbreaker over a red polo. Classmates remember Chetal as shy and a fan of cars. “He just kind of kept to himself,” says Marco Dias, who became friends with Chetal junior year. According to another classmate named Nick Paris, this was true of Chetal until one day in the middle of his senior year, when he showed up at school driving a Corvette. “He just parked in the lot. It was 7:30 a.m., and everyone was like, What?” Paris says. Soon Chetal rolled up in a BMW, and then a Lamborghini Urus. He started wearing Louis Vuitton shirts and Gucci shoes, and on Senior Skip Day, while Paris and many of his classmates went to a nearby mall, Chetal took some friends, including Dias, to New York to party on a yacht he had rented, where they took photos holding wads of cash. Chetal said that he had made his money trading crypto; Dias says Chetal showed him trades on his phone as proof one morning during homeroom class. Once, Chetal rented a large house in Stamford, Conn., and hosted a three-day gathering with friends. “I was in the basement at one point, and I was just messing around with my friends, and I just see him, like, just on the couch, just like on his phone, pretty much avoiding everyone at the party,” Dias says. “And I thought, Oh, that’s kind of weird.” Paris remembers that during a school parade, the police stopped Chetal in his Lamborghini Urus for a traffic violation. “He literally called his lawyer on the spot before answering the cops’ questions, which everyone was like: Wow, this guy’s got, like, something going for him. Like, this guy’s got serious money.” Independent investigators say Chetal was secretly a member of the Com, also referred to as the Comm or the Community, an online network of chat groups that has its roots in the hacking underground of the 1980s and functions as a kind of social network for cybercriminals or aspiring ones. In an affidavit from an unrelated case, an F.B.I. agent described the Com as “a geographically diverse group of individuals, organized in various subgroups, all of whom coordinate through online communication applications such as Discord and Telegram to engage in various types of criminal activity.” According to the F.B.I. affidavit and experts who study the Com, the various subgroups’ activities include swatting, which entails making false reports to emergency services or institutions like schools to trigger a police response; SIM swapping, when hackers take over a target’s phone number, sometimes by tricking customer-service representatives; ransomware attacks, using a malware that denies users or organizers access to computer files; cryptocurrency theft; and corporate intrusions. Allison Nixon, the chief research officer of Unit 221B, a collective of cybersecurity experts, has been following this growing corner of the internet since 2011 and is widely considered to be a pre-eminent expert on the Com. She says most Com members are young men from Western countries. In group chats, many talk about college and taking classes in cybersecurity, which they use to their advantage, she says. The gateway for many is through video games like RuneScape, Roblox and Grand Theft Auto. Advertisement SKIP ADVERTISEMENT By the mid-2010s, a more sinister world was also blossoming within Minecraft — the creative building game — facilitated by the advent of online servers, owned and operated by users, that allowed gamers to kill one another in teams, or “factions.” On these servers, Minecraft evolved into a highly competitive battle zone. With that came opportunities to monetize and scam. Servers soon began to introduce in-game purchases that gave players upgrades, like the ability to fly and to fight with more powerful weapons and armor. Other in-game purchases bought users stylish character outfits, which were wielded to show status online. As players gravitated toward these competitive servers, a large black market for in-game items and valuable user names started to blossom on Discord. With Minecraft dominated by young players, the black market became ripe for fraud. Users agreed to trade in-game items for real money via PayPal, but once the money was received, scammers would block the user’s account. This became so rampant that people started advertising themselves as verified middlemen who would take both the money and the in-game item and then hand it off to each party for a fee. One prized possession in this world is high-value user names, often no more than four letters — such as Tree, OK, Mark, YOLO or G, any of which could go for upward of $10,000. As faction-based servers and the Minecraft black market thrived, so did cryptocurrencies, which eventually supplanted PayPal on these servers. It was this combination of a consequence-free training ground for competition, gambling and fraud, with a growing familiarity with crypto, that turned Minecraft servers into a cesspool for budding cybercriminals. When the price of Bitcoin began to rise rapidly in 2017, Com members made an easy shift from Minecraft fraud to crypto theft. One of the popular Com forums was called “OGUsers.” It was initially dedicated to discussing and buying social media accounts and user names, but it evolved into a platform for cybercrime, including SIM swapping and Twitter account hijackings. “Very, very quickly these antisocial communities turned into overnight millionaires and propagated this culture, because people notice when other people turn into millionaires overnight, and they want to learn how they did that,” Nixon explains. “The size of the Com exploded.” A common tactic used by the Com today to steal cryptocurrency is what’s called social engineering, which entails manipulating users into divulging sensitive information. Com members put together long lists of potential victims, obtained through data breaches, and then directly target them, which is what occurred in the case of the D.C. victim. They will sometimes post job listings online to recruit people to help them with their schemes. One listing posted on Telegram that Nick Bax, the crypto investigator, shared with me promised “5f a week” — that is, five figures — “if ur not slow” to phone potential targets. “American professional customer service voice is required,” it read. Sometimes, Com members will then return to the Minecraft black market to launder their stolen crypto by buying valuable game items and selling the items for real dollars using PayPal. After ZachXBT had Veer Chetal’s name, it didn’t take long for him and other investigators to figure out the identities of others involved in the crypto heist. In the recordings ZachXBT obtained, the thieves referred to one another by their Com aliases, but also in some cases by their real first names. One name frequently uttered was Malone. This was Malone Lam, a known figure in the Com who went by the aliases Greavys and Anne Hathaway. Lam was a 20-year-old from Singapore and a notorious Minecraft player with bangs roughly chopped at his eye line. He had been banned from Minecraft servers only to maneuver his way back in. In the spring of 2023, when he got into a minor disagreement with the managers of the server Minecadia that resulted in him losing in-game items, he doxxed the staff, releasing their addresses and Social Security numbers online and, in at least one case, sending emergency services to their house, according to several users and Discord chats from the time. It was within Minecraft that Chetal and Lam first connected, playing together on a faction led by Lam. In October 2023, Lam arrived in the United States on a 90-day visa. He had largely stopped playing Minecraft. According to court documents, he began funding his lifestyle with other crypto-related fraud. After the August 2024 crypto heist, ZachXBT was able to track Lam through what’s called OSINT — open-source intelligence. In other words, social media. In Com chat groups, word was spreading that Lam was on a wild spending spree. Nobody seemed to know the source of his money, but they spoke of his lavish exploits at Los Angeles nightclubs. ZachXBT researched the most popular nightclubs in the city and then searched Instagram stories from partyers and the clubs themselves. In one post, Malone was filmed wearing a white Moncler jacket and what appeared to be diamond rings and diamond-encrusted sunglasses. He stood up on the table and began showering the crowd with hundred-dollar bills. As money rained down, servers paraded in $1,500 bottles of Champagne topped with sparklers and held up signs that read “@Malone.” He spent $569,528 in one evening alone. At one nightclub, Lam and his crew trolled ZachXBT, getting clubgoers to hold up signs reading “TOLD U WE’D WIN,” while another read, “[Expletive] ZACHXBT.” Over the course of a few weeks, Lam bought 31 automobiles, including custom Lamborghinis, Ferraris and Porsches, some valued as high as $3 million. On Aug. 24, he apparently sent a photo of a pink Lamborghini to a model. “I got you a present, we’ll call it an early birthday gift,” he texted her. She wrote back, “I am taken once again.” He replied, “idc” — I don’t care. On Sept. 10, after a 23-day party spree in Los Angeles, Lam headed to Miami on a private jet with a group of friends. There, he rented multiple homes, including a 10-bedroom, $7.5 million estate. Within a few days, Lam had filled the driveway with more luxury cars, including multiple Lamborghinis, one with the name “Malone” printed on the side. Every few days, ZachXBT sent the intelligence he’d collected to law enforcement. The information generally flowed one way, but federal authorities were conducting their own investigation simultaneously. According to court filings, the supposed co-conspirators used sophisticated money-laundering methods to hide the funds and mask their identities, using crypto exchanges like eXch, which does not require personal customer information, and VPN connections that disguise their locations. But in at least one instance, according to the authorities, one of them was sloppy, neglecting to use a VPN when he created an account with TradeOgre, a digital currency exchange, which connected to an I.P. address that was registered to a $47,500-per-month rental home in Encino, Calif. It was leased to Jeandiel Serrano, 21, who went by VersaceGod, @SkidStar and Box online. By the time the authorities identified Serrano, he was on vacation in the Maldives with his girlfriend. On Sept. 18, Serrano flew back from the Maldives to Los Angeles International Airport, where the authorities were waiting for him. He was wearing a $500,000 watch at the time of his arrest. Serrano initially denied knowledge of the theft and agreed to speak with law enforcement without a lawyer. But he soon acknowledged his involvement, according to court reports, specifically to impersonating a Gemini employee. Serrano admitted that he owned five cars, two of which were gifts from one of his co-conspirators, given to him with proceeds from a previous fraud. He also confessed to having access to approximately $20 million of the victim’s crypto on his phone and agreed to transfer the funds back to the F.B.I. At the same time, agents in Miami were preparing to raid one of Lam’s rented mansions. Lam knew it was coming: Immediately after Serrano’s arrest, Serrano’s girlfriend called to warn his co-conspirators. They then deleted their Telegram accounts and other incriminating evidence from their phones. Later that day, a team of F.B.I. agents working with the Miami police raided a mansion near Miami Shores. Agents blew open the front metal gate while another group entered by boat via a small saltwater canal in the rear. The sound of flashbangs rang in the neighborhood as the agents entered the home. Moments later, an agent escorted a handcuffed Lam, who wore a long-sleeve white top, maroon basketball shorts and sneakers, as smoke hung in the air, followed by at least five other people who were in the house with him. Serrano and Lam were charged with money laundering and conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They face up to 20 years in prison for each charge. Exactly one month after the heist, the party was over. In Danbury, in the days and weeks after the kidnapping of the Chetals, Castrovinci and the police worked with federal investigators to build cases against the group from Florida. They obtained emergency access to the suspects’ phones, where they could view group chat exchanges and record the groups’ movements. They learned that the trip was organized and paid for in part by Angel Borrero, a 23-year-old from Miami who went by Chi Chi. In the group conversation, Borrero wrote to the others, “If this go good we out to Cali next,” which federal investigators took to mean the group was planning something else in California. The same day, Josue Alberto Romero, who used the nickname Sway, sent a message to the group: “Chichi we are more ready than ever.” The chats indicated that the group began coordinating as early as 7 a.m. and spent part of the afternoon surveilling the Chetals. By then, the authorities had established a motive: The men, the police believed, had targeted the Chetals to hold them ransom for the money their son had. Independent investigators think that at least one member of the group, Reynaldo (Rey) Diaz, who they say went by the alias Pantic, was a member of the Com; ZachXBT speculates that the thieves might have made themselves targets by sharing stories of their spending with other Com members. “You would think you commit a crime, you would shut up and keep to yourselves,” he says. “But they kind of have to compensate, showing off to their friends — who they think are their friends. But they might not be their friends.” On Aug. 27, Danbury police filed charges against the six suspects in the case: multiple counts of first-degree assault, first-degree kidnapping and reckless endangerment. Federal charges followed. On Sept. 24, a grand-jury indictment filed in Federal District Court in Connecticut charged the six Florida men with kidnapping, carjacking and conspiracy crimes. The six Florida men reflect a growing faction of the Com, those less interested in online schemes and more concerned with using brute force. Diaz was himself shot in Florida two years earlier when he was the target of a robbery attempt. In the F.B.I. affidavit, an agent said the Com regularly commits “brickings, shootings and firebomb attacks.” In 2022, according to reporting from Brian Krebs, an independent investigative journalist, a young man who went by the moniker Foreshadow was kidnapped and beaten by a rival SIM-swapping gang and held for a $200,000 ransom. In October 2023, a 22-year-old named Patrick McGovern-Allen of Egg Harbor Township, N.J., was sentenced to 13 years in prison for participating in violence-for-hire jobs after being contracted by a group of cybercriminals. Last November, it was reported that the chief executive of a Toronto-based crypto company was kidnapped and held for a $1 million ransom. A few weeks later, after a 13-year-old known as the Gen Z Quant Kid created a crypto coin and inflated its value, the crypto community responded by doxxing him and his family and, it is rumored, kidnapping his dog. In January this year, a founder of the French crypto company Ledger was kidnapped with his wife; the kidnappers mutilated his hand and demanded a multimillion-dollar ransom in cryptocurrency. But increasingly, people who have nothing to do with the Com are being targeted, says Nixon, the researcher. Some alleged Com members participate in what are known as harm groups, whose members coerce young women and girls into committing acts of self-harm and violence. Seven years ago, Nixon says, there were maybe a few dozen people in the Com worth being concerned about; today, there are thousands. “Right now,” she says, “we are seeing an evolution from disorganized crime to organized crime, and we are somewhere in the middle point of that.” The twin episodes — the crypto heist and the kidnapping — suggest that the complete lawlessness of Com members’ online lives allowed them to imagine that they could get away with similar exploits in the real world. “I don’t think they really learn,” ZachXBT says. “I’ve seen a lot of them, after they either get either arrested, have assets seized, et cetera — I see a lot of them go back to what they were doing before.” This year, five of the six Florida men pleaded guilty to federal kidnapping and conspiracy charges. They could face 15 years in prison. In a Hartford court in January, 19-year-old Michael Rivas apologized for his actions, calling them “dumb” and saying he was helping another man carry out a “vendetta,” although he didn’t elaborate. In February, a 22-year-old Georgia man named James Schwab was indicted in connection with the kidnapping plot. According to the federal criminal complaint, Schwab had an altercation with Veer Chetal in a Miami nightclub a month before the kidnapping, and he helped fund the plot and arrange transportation and lodging for the attackers. He pleaded not guilty. On March 25, ZachXBT posted a new message to his original thread on X chronicling his investigation into the stolen crypto. “Update: Wiz (Veer Chetal) was arrested,” he wrote. “Here is his mug shot.” The photo attached featured a young man in a white T-shirt with bushy hair, a dark beard, a downturned mouth and exhausted eyes. He bore little resemblance to the kid pictured on the Immaculate High School website. The charge listed in jail records is a federal misdemeanor offense but doesn’t specify what that offense is. According to ZachXBT, the stolen Bitcoin he traced to addresses belonging to Chetal is now in a wallet controlled by law enforcement. The matte gray Lamborghini Urus — the one that Sushil and Radhika Chetal were driving the day of the kidnapping — is still sitting as evidence in a secure police lot in Danbury. It’s the same Lamborghini their son once drove to school.

Construction of the world’s tallest unoccupied skyscraper may resume as early as next week, almost 10 years after work ground to a halt, according to Chinese state media. The 597-meter-tall (1,959-foot) Goldin Finance 117, which topped out in the northern Chinese port city of Tianjin but has stood unfinished since 2015 amid major financial difficulties, is now expected to complete in 2027. At 117 stories high, the tower was set to be China’s tallest skyscraper when it broke ground in 2008. The soaring structure was built using “mega columns” to protect against strong winds and earthquakes, while its “walking stick” design was topped by a diamond-shaped atrium containing a swimming pool and observation deck. It was set to contain offices and a five-star hotel on the upper floors, according to architects P&T Group. But the project came to a standstill following the 2015 Chinese stock market crash that plunged the future of Hong Kong-based Goldin Properties Holdings into doubt. The real estate developer, whose founder Pan Sutong was once among Hong Kong’s richest businessmen, has since gone into liquidation. A new construction permit — which reportedly lists a contract value of almost 569 million yuan ($78 million) — suggests the defunct developer’s title may have been dropped from the building’s name, according to state media. It is unclear whether plans for the “supertall” skyscraper’s use remain unchanged. Neither P&T Group nor BGI Engineering Consultants, the state-owned company named on the permit, responded to CNN’s requests for comment. Over the last decade, the abandoned skyscrapers littering China’s skylines have become emblematic of the country’s real estate woes. In 2020, its housing ministry and National Development and Reform Commission issued guidelines banning new towers over 500 meters (1,640 feet) in height — a move seemingly aimed, in part, at reining in the speculative financing often underpinning skyscraper projects. On Monday, China’s Greenland Group announced that work is also resuming on the previously stalled Chengdu Greenland Tower in the southwestern city of Chengdu, local state-owned media reported. Construction of the 468-meter-tall (1,535-foot) skyscraper has been on hold since 2023, after the state-owned developer encountered financial difficulties, according to Reuters. The fact that two high-profile projects are resuming at the same time is unlikely to be a coincidence, said Qiao Shitong, a law professor at Duke University School of Law and the author of two books on Chinese real estate. “The national government has made it clear it wants to stabilize the real estate market,” said Qiao over a video call, adding that it has been encouraging local governments to help “revive” the struggling sector. “It is signaling to the market — (it’s) not only about the skyscrapers themselves.” Although the Tianjin tower’s new financing is yet to be disclosed, Qiao believes the state has offered investment and debt restructuring to help kickstart the project. “(Supertall skyscrapers) are not necessarily the most efficient projects and they are not necessarily making profits, but they are indicators,” he said. “By having this project revived and completed, the government at least hopes it can increase people’s confidence.” For local officials, completing abandoned skyscrapers is also about “the image of the city,” said Fei Chen, a reader in architecture and urban design at the UK’s University of Liverpool. “They don’t want a project to be unfinished and to stay like that, which is an eyesore for everyone.” Chen stressed, however, that the resumption of projects in Tianjin and Chengdu is unlikely to herald a return to the “vanity projects” of recent years. “The government is conscious that although these (skyscraper) projects have some positive effects on the area, they require too much investment and are not financially or environmentally sustainable… I think the general urban development trend is not changed by the fact that some projects are being resumed. I think it’s more about local government efforts to make their city better.” Despite economic concerns and tightening regulations, China continues to dominate global skyscraper construction. Of the 133 skyscrapers measuring 200 meters or above completed around the world last year, 91 were in China, according to data from the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat. Chen said that skyscrapers, although expensive to build, are often used by developers as “magnets” for investment in the surrounding area. Goldin Finance 117, for instance, was part of a wider development containing villas, commercial buildings and offices, as well as a convention center, entertainment center and polo club. The fate of these projects is not explicitly outlined in the new construction permit, though it reportedly describes the development of several “commercial corridors.” But with sluggish property sales and struggling office occupancy rates across China, the project’s economic viability remains in question, said Qiao. “It’s a huge investment,” he added “And I seriously don’t know who is going to buy or rent this commercial space.” During the decade-long hiatus, Tianjin welcomed another supertall skyscraper — the Tianjin CTF Finance Centre, which at 530 meters (1,739 feet) is currently the world’s eighth tallest completed building. Goldin Finance 117 has meanwhile been surpassed in height by both the twisting Shanghai Tower and the Ping An Finance Centre in Shenzhen, meaning it would now only become the country’s third tallest (and the world’s sixth tallest) skyscraper upon completion. It will fall to eighth globally if Saudi Arabia’s kilometer-high Jeddah Tower — on which construction also recently resumed, following a years-long hiatus — and Dubai’s Burj Azizi are both completed later this decade.