Deteriorating economic conditions and inequalities of wealth distributions lead many desperate people to extreme ways of getting other people wealth. In recent time, there were many attempts of kidnapping of wealthy people with purposes to extract their crypto and financial assets. See [1-5].
There are two types of kidnappers: non-professional and professional. Non professional kidnappers usually are criminal or desperate people hoping to force other people, to share with them their wealth, by means of threats, beatings, tortures, etc. Such kidnappers know that the majority of people are afraid of tortures, pains and physical death. But, there is the minority of people with a high degree of tolerance to physical pain, who are not afraid of experience to go via the death of their physical bodies. Professional kidnappers, usually, use a set of chemicals called “truth serum”. Any person gives truthful answers to kidnappers questions when she/he is under influences of such chemicals, injected in her/his body. This means that if a person knows how to get passwords and private keys then this person would reveal them if she/he would be under the influences of “truth serum”.
In this post, we consider a simple way to protect your crypto or financial wealth in a case if you would be kidnapped by kidnappers, who would ask you to reveal your passwords and private cryptographic keys.
The first step of defense is to spread your cryptos and fiat currencies among multiple, for example 100, accounts and virtual crypto wallets, which require at least one piece of offline software to generate your virtual private keys and virtual passwords to your accounts. This piece of offline software should be placed in a secure place of your home or office, or given to a trusted person (relative or friend).
If kidnappers would ask you where are your private keys or passwords, you would answer that they are generated by some offline software, which is in a secure place. This means that the kidnappers would not be able to get your crypto and financial wealth in an easy way, after the kidnapping of you. They would need to break into your home/office or to kidnap the trusted person to get the required piece of offline software, which significantly increases costs and risks for kidnappers. If costs and risks associated with a successful attempt exceed all the benefits/rewards of this attempt then there is no any sense in such attempt to kidnap you.
The second step of defense is to set up a script (or AI bot) on a remote server, which constantly monitors all your accounts/wallets and would transfer your cryptos and fiat currencies to new virtual wallets and accounts, in any case, if at least a single transaction would be initiated on your current accounts and crypto wallets. Even in the case if the kidnappers would be able to start a transfer, they would not be able to find anything in 99 accounts and wallets. This means that your losses would be limited to only assets in a single account or wallet.
This simple defense scheme has only a single level of defense, but may be increased to multiple levels, where different scripts/AI bots monitor all accounts on the previous level and transfer cryptos and fiat currencies to new accounts and virtual wallets controlled by a different piece of offline software on the next level, if at least a single transaction is discovered on the previous level. Each additional level of such defense significantly increase costs and risks for kidnappers.
According to statistical data (see [5]), there are about 52,000 kidnappings in USA, 27,000 in Pakistan, 7,000 in United Kingdom, 5,000 in Germany, 4,000 in Canada per each year. These countries have the highest numbers of kidnappings per year. The troubling fact is that rates of growth in kidnappings are growing in many countries. For example, in Germany an average rate was 5.6 kidnappings per 100,000 people from 2004 to 2017, but in 2022 it was 5.87 (see [5-6]).
References:
1. https://apnews.com/article/new-york-city-kidnapping-cryptocurrency-16ccb88647944281ab6af10503d17eb5
3. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-69023845
5. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/kidnappings-per-country
6. https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/kidnapping/
