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UK’s First Bitcoin Armed Robbery

Photo courtesy of UK’s metro shows the couple’s four-bedroom home where they were held at gunpoint by armed robbers.
Photo courtesy of UK’s metro shows the couple’s four-bedroom home where they were held at gunpoint by armed robbers.
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UK’s First Bitcoin Armed Robbery

Photo courtesy of UK’s metro shows the couple’s four-bedroom home where they were held at gunpoint by armed robbers.
Photo courtesy of UK’s metro shows the couple’s four-bedroom home where they were held at gunpoint by armed robbers.

Armed robbers have raided the house of a British virtual currency trader, forcing him to transfer Bitcoins after tying up his wife and threatening him with a gun, British media reported on Monday.

The robbery happened on January 22 at the couple's home in the village of Moulsford in southeast England, according to the Daily Mail, which said the cryptocurrency crime was the first of its kind.

Four robbers wearing balaclavas broke into the house of Danny Aston, 30, and his wife Amy Jay, 31.

A Thames Valley Police spokesman quoted by the Daily Telegraph said only that police were investigating an "aggravated burglary" in Moulsford last week and that the occupants of the house had been "threatened".

No arrests have been made but the reports said that Aston may have been targeted because of his high profile in the cryptocurrency community.

According to company registry records, Aston and Jay are directors of Aston Digital Currencies, which specializes in managing virtual currency portfolios.

The firm was created in June 2017 at a time when Bitcoin was trading at around 2,500 euros.

It has since risen sharply to a peak of 16,323 euros on December 17 before falling back below 10,000 euros.

The Sun quoted a neighbor as saying that the couple had gone into hiding at a secret address after the terrifying raid.

Using a pseudonym, Aston has carried out more than 100,000 transactions with 16,375 partners.

Some of them referred to him online using his real name, which may have led robbers directly to him.

Bitcoin is a virtual currency created from computer code that allows anonymous transactions. Unlike a real-world unit such as the US dollar or euro, it has no central bank and is not backed by any government.

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Varieties

Climate Change Causing More Change in Rainfall, Fiercer Typhoons, Scientists Say 

People and vehicles wade through the water along a street that was flooded by Typhoon Gaemi in Kaohsiung on July 25, 2024. (AFP)
People and vehicles wade through the water along a street that was flooded by Typhoon Gaemi in Kaohsiung on July 25, 2024. (AFP)
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Climate Change Causing More Change in Rainfall, Fiercer Typhoons, Scientists Say 

People and vehicles wade through the water along a street that was flooded by Typhoon Gaemi in Kaohsiung on July 25, 2024. (AFP)
People and vehicles wade through the water along a street that was flooded by Typhoon Gaemi in Kaohsiung on July 25, 2024. (AFP)

Climate change is driving changes in rainfall patterns across the world, scientists said in a paper published on Friday, which could also be intensifying typhoons and other tropical storms.

Taiwan, the Philippines and then China were lashed by the year's most powerful typhoon this week, with schools, businesses and financial markets shut as wind speeds surged up to 227 kph (141 mph). On China's eastern coast, hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated ahead of landfall on Thursday.

Stronger tropical storms are part of a wider phenomenon of weather extremes driven by higher temperatures, scientists say.

Researchers led by Zhang Wenxia at the China Academy of Sciences studied historical meteorological data and found about 75% of the world's land area had seen a rise in "precipitation variability" or wider swings between wet and dry weather.

Warming temperatures have enhanced the ability of the atmosphere to hold moisture, which is causing wider fluctuations in rainfall, the researchers said in a paper published by the Science journal.

"(Variability) has increased in most places, including Australia, which means rainier rain periods and drier dry periods," said Steven Sherwood, a scientist at the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, who was not involved in the study.

"This is going to increase as global warming continues, enhancing the chances of droughts and/or floods."

FEWER, BUT MORE INTENSE, STORMS

Scientists believe that climate change is also reshaping the behavior of tropical storms, including typhoons, making them less frequent but more powerful.

"I believe higher water vapor in the atmosphere is the ultimate cause of all of these tendencies toward more extreme hydrologic phenomena," Sherwood told Reuters.

Typhoon Gaemi, which first made landfall in Taiwan on Wednesday, was the strongest to hit the island in eight years.

While it is difficult to attribute individual weather events to climate change, models predict that global warming makes typhoons stronger, said Sachie Kanada, a researcher at Japan's Nagoya University.

"In general, warmer sea surface temperature is a favorable condition for tropical cyclone development," she said.

In its "blue paper" on climate change published this month, China said the number of typhoons in the Northwest Pacific and South China Sea had declined significantly since the 1990s, but they were getting stronger.

Taiwan also said in its climate change report published in May that climate change was likely to reduce the overall number of typhoons in the region while making each one more intense.

The decrease in the number of typhoons is due to the uneven pattern of ocean warming, with temperatures rising faster in the western Pacific than the east, said Feng Xiangbo, a tropical cyclone research scientist at the University of Reading.

Water vapor capacity in the lower atmosphere is expected to rise by 7% for each 1 degree Celsius increase in temperatures, with tropical cyclone rainfall in the United States surging by as much as 40% for each single degree rise, he said.