A middle-aged Swedish couple was recently targeted by criminals in an attempt to steal their bitcoin. The couple was physically abused and threatened by four masked men who entered their house to rob their cryptocurrency.
The attack on the couple has raised concern over Sweden citizen’s security due to the public accessibility of personal information, including residential addresses, finances, and tax records.
A prominent crypto entrepreneur, Eric Wall, shared a post highlighting the incident and said that this is another attempt in the country targeting Bitcoin or crypto profiles, as two similar cases occurred last month.
“What appears to be common for each of these cases is that the victims had livestreamed a podcast about bitcoin/crypto days before their assault, or mentioned bitcoin in a public context,” stated Eric.
He further said that the situation is occurring in Sweden because anyone can easily search for any person’s residential address. Government records such as tax and finance reports are also open and can be acquired by anyone publicly.
While the motive behind keeping citizen information public under “The Principle of Public Access to Information” is to reduce corruption, it is widely misused for this kind of incident.
“Sweden is probably one of the least safe countries to be active in the cryptocurrency sector in at the moment.” Eric added, “I’ve personally left Sweden and I don’t expect to return until the laws around personal privacy change.”
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