The Underworld Podcast - The Icelandic Drug-Smuggling Fellowship's Massive Bitcoin Heist

Episode Date: July 12, 2021

How did an Icelandic band of international drug smugglers pull off their nation’s most shocking heist, robbing millions in Bitcoin mining machines then disappearing into the frozen wilderness? And how did its mastermind (some say: pawn) escape from jail, hop across Europe only to be hobbled by the exact network he’d relied on as a free man? Iceland’s ‘Big Bitcoin Heist’ is a tale of boom and bust, opportunity and clownish failure. Above all it’s a great story. Does anyone know the correct pronunciation of the word "Geyser"?!?!? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. I'm Lola Blanc. And I'm Megan Elizabeth. And we're the hosts of Trust Me, the podcast about Colts, extreme belief, and the abuse of power. Now on podcast one. We want to debunk the myth that people who join Colts are uneducated because anyone can be manipulated by a narcissist. And we should know we both have been.

Join us every week as we explore the world. extreme belief, talk to survivors and experts, and share our own experiences with cults and the abuse of power. Get new episodes of Trust Me every Wednesday on Podcast One and anywhere you get your podcasts. April 2018, Iceland. Sindri Stephenson, convicted thief and leader of a gang that's stolen millions in Bitcoin mining machines, is fed up of life behind bars. Cops have had him in solitary for a month, and now he's in one of Iceland's so-called open prisons. In the middle of the wilderness in one of the world's strangest countries. That's it. Sinju climbs out of a prison window, runs down a gravel path to a pal who's waiting in a car. They drive for an hour along

Iceland's beautiful serrated coast to Keflavik, the country's international airport, where Sindri, dressed in a black hoodie, boards under a fake ID. There he travels to Stockholm, Sweden, and kicks off a manhunt that has his entire country on the edge of its seat for days, crossing a bunch of international borders, before getting caught in the beach. pretty clownish way. This is how the so-called Bitcoin highest turns from a local tale into a global sensation.

And it's one I was lucky enough to cover for GQ. Welcome to the underworld podcast. So yeah, guys, we're finally doing a crypto story. I mean, we've kind of done bits. We've, like, danced around crypto, right? Yeah, the Nigeria stuff, we talked about that and the Bitcoin blood stuff, I think in one of the earlier episodes, was definitely crypto-oriented.

Yeah, yeah. You're pretty into your crypto though, right? Dogecoin and stuff? Yeah, I mean, that's really four months ago. I'm losing money in coins you've never even heard of, like the kind of thing where you've got to buy Bitcoin on one platform, transfer to another platform, then another. Like, it's out of control. I don't know if I'm into it.

I'm more into the idea of getting rich quickly with doing very little work. I like that too. Right. Yeah, unfortunately, I've never worked harder at losing my money as with crypto right now. All right. Well, here's one way of doing it, I guess, this story. And I guess folks will probably know this, but the big Bitcoin heist rather in Iceland, it's like it's not actually up there with the biggest crypto heists.

Like the problem is all of those big ones are just like kind of hackers and stuff not quite as thrilling. Yeah, kind of like with that jail escape, which isn't exactly a Shawshank Redemption. You know, it's more like, hey, I just walked out. Yeah, Sindhu Sefenson was just playing PlayStation and decided to jump out the window. It's not quite, Andy Dufring. But I mean, yeah, the biggest walkaways in crypto have come from hacks, right? So there's the 2014 hack of Mount Gox, this Tokyo-based Bitcoin Exchange. And that's where somebody stole 850,000 bitcoins, which would have been worth almost half a billion then.

And by the way, the same amount would be worth like 33 billion today, which gives you, I mean, they're getting rich quick. Even bigger than that, though, like, is when hackers found a loophole at Coin Check, which is also, Japanese. I mean, come on guys. We've got gangsters with their logo on the office door and hackers walking into your tech firms. And these guys, this time round, made off with $530 million worth of NEM, which I think is like Ethereum and which is kind of the infrastructure, the blockchain and a currency. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. I've actually never heard of NEM because we're all Binance gang now. But yeah, it sounds like it could be accurate. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

I mean, I'm sure we get loads of emails about crypto. But I mean, yeah, obviously, the stuff gets pretty deep, pretty quickly. I remember me and my co-writer, we're reporting this Iceland story, and the longest part was trying to condense what the hell of Bitcoin actually was in a way that didn't veer off into complete bullshit. And I should say we actually signed a deal for this story, which I'm really excited about because it makes some great doco entertainment. I mean, it was absolutely nuts how easy it was to chat to people of this story in Iceland. Like, we just rock up to a bar, and some old guy would just come out with these crazy stories about how we used to run a lucrative drug smuggling operation for years.

We've wound up in the Icelandic underworld. That is such a thing, by the way. Yeah, I'm not buying that. I'm sure some guy probably told you he was smuggling herring, and you just heard him wrong. I thought you were talking to some big time gangster. That could be the way. I mean, some of these guys' faces,

they've definitely been hit a fair few times. But, I mean, it kind of became funny to us that, as we got further and further into this story, mostly just in, like, Reckivik, the capital. The main people we have issues getting through to. They're not the criminals at all, but they're the crypto guys who are just, like, really, secretive, these kind of libertarian types who think journalists are scum, another part of the

establishment and so on. They were a pain in the ass. The criminals, they were great. I love them. Anyway, this story begins before crypto even existed, right? So we're going to go all the way back to 2008 when the global financial crash, pummeled economies all over the world. I don't think it's said enough how much that moment shaped the world we live in. Like, a lot of people think 9-11 was a turning point, and it was, obviously, but the 2008 crash It just completely changed entire parts of the world. Few populism from India to France. Like, it was huge.

So if you're in New York, you're going to remember Lehman Brothers collapsing. You've got all these suits wheeling out there off his stuff in Lower Manhattan. And then this whole system of shitty loans and bad bet starts imploding, really. And before anyone's really had a chance to blink, there's eight trillion bucks lost on the New York Stock Exchange. Entire countries are going bust. It says a financial expert to the Washington Post, quote, it was such a shock to the economic system, that it unleashed dynamics that we still don't understand fully. So then you've got probably America's greatest public spending drive,

biggest tax to socialism since the New Deal, bailing out of these companies who dump their wealth and crap investments and stuff. And out of it comes this massive skepticism in the markets. Like, if the whole thing is basically just billionaires betting on stuff and when they lose, they get bailed out, what's the point taking part? Spoken like a man who doesn't have an IRA. Gladly. And what people might not know is that Iceland, this tiny, tiny little chunk of land between Europe and North America, incredible place full of volcanoes, glaciers, black beaches, geeseers, crazy. This tiny little island nation of under half a million folks, it gets battered

by the financial crisis. I think, I haven't read it in a long time, but Michael Lewis, I think, had a whole chapter about that in his book on the financial collapse, which was all about, like, you know, people who were fishermen during the day and then becoming stock traders at night and they just seem perfectly situated for a collapse. Yeah, this is it entirely, right? These people, they call themselves the new Vikings, right? These are guys mostly working for Iceland's three national banks and they've been, you know, in inverted commas, sailing out in the world and making risky investments. And before this bubble burst, like in the book, yeah, you've got these guys in tiny little fish shacks rocking up in brand new FUVs. Icelanders buying,

Premier League football club shout out to West Ham and tons of these folks are just like sort of the earth fishermen, public service workers you know guys on the omnibus basically and in total those three national banks bet over six times Iceland's GDP and this is from my story quote when Lehman Brothers fell

so did they and they took Iceland with them 97% of its finance sector sank in just three days four fifths of its stock market vanished accounts went from millions to zero in minutes people queued up outside banks, stuffing notes into plastic bags like Vaimori River Germans. So it's chaos, basically. And in January 2009,

people gather outside the parliament building in the capital Rakhivik, which, just like everything in that city, rather, is just this, like, quaint little dimpled stonehouse on a square, very Icelandic. And in more Icelandic style, these guys, they don't get violent, they just start bashing pots and pans, demand the government steps down, and they call it, guess what? the Pots and Pants Revolution.

That isn't making our end of year, nameless, sorry, guys. So January 2009, this is the moment. That same month, a developer or developers calling themselves Satoshi Nakamoto invents Bitcoin. This virtual currency that never touches

the existing banking system. You basically mine Bitcoin like gold and like gold, there's a finite amount of the stuff, which mostly gives it value. The last one will be dug up in theory in like 2000. 140 or something, 2140. And then I guess the entire thing will come crashing down.

I don't know. Feel free to slam what his info, like crypto geek guy followers. I don't know. Yeah, blame Sean for this. I mean, I don't know if I'm a true believer in this stuff, but I'm definitely not about going around insulting our new billionaire overlords, you know? I feel like the whole point of the scarcity is that it's not going to come crash it down. Like everyone's saying when there's a finite amount, that's when it's going to skyrocket.

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I don't know either, and I'm sure I'm going to get slammed as well, yeah. But anyway, you dig this stuff out, right, by solving massive maths problems with a computer. You churn out algorithms and a Bitcoin pops out of the ether. And it's all stored in the blockchain, which is this digital ledger that's basically uncorruptible. Although that's not entirely true. And honestly, when I was reporting tech back in the day, like, if I heard some guy say he started was, quote, on the blockchain, I'd like mentally zone out.

And it often just doesn't mean anything like AI that's machine learning. Anyway, those are petty problems for another day. You know, the thing with blockchain is it actually, I don't, should we even get into this? I think blockchain actually has like real world uses. It's just the way it gets formed. I don't know, man. Like we're not, we're not crypto people. If you're looking for that, you can find much better explanations and discussions

and other places. I'm hoping that's coming across. But yeah, anyway, like, tech is one of the grimmest beats around, by the way. I hate it. But if you want to laugh, I'm not saying that's my editors at Wired. I love you. But if you want to laugh, I put a couple of stories on the reading list about crypto cruise ships and this kind of stuff. And there's this like brilliant long read by Lorry Penny about spending four days on one of these things, this like cruise ship full of crypto guys. It's worldwide for a read. Check it out on our website, guys. Anyway, to dig out

all of these bitcoins, you need computing power. A lot of it. These great big server banks are like supermarket shelving stacks, and they're buzzing away in a warehouse nonstop, and they're sucking up, like, huge amounts of energy. You get these capnip facts, Gerno's love, which aren't always the most useful describing things, like, according to a BBC article from this February, Bitcoin uses more energy than Argentina, which, all right, I mean, it's cool, right? But how many baggies of coconut bar on a dark web with Argentina? So all these things purring away doesn't just sap all the energy in the world.

It also gets really, really hot. So where's best to have all these warehouses? Someone with bountiful energy is cheap and cold. So Iceland literally sits on all this bubbling geothermal energy, which is work that they have all these geysers and volcanoes. And it's got a surplus of the stuff just coming up through the ground, making everything smell really farty. And it barely gets over 50 degrees even in summer.

So this tiny little island suddenly becomes downtown Cryptotown. And folks start making big, bucks again, hosting Bitcoin companies from all over the world. Loads of them rock up in this industrial park called Asbury, which is a former U.S. Navy base near Keflavik Airport. And suddenly this damp southern little trading estate is churning out millions in Bitcoin. We're talking millions of dollars or millions of Bitcoin? It's got to be millions of dollars.

In Bitcoin. Yeah. So like, I don't know. I don't know what that is. It's probably like one Bitcoin nowadays. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I get what you're saying. Also, you keep saying geysers. I was really confused. Is it gazers? It's geysers. Yeah. Geezer is like slang for like an English, an English person. Like a guy, right?

Yeah, I thought they had same thing. Yeah, no, geysers. All right, cool. It's okay, man. It's got geysers, guys. It's got geysers, whatever. No one knows who Nakamoto is, by the way, which is pretty impressive,

given how global Bitcoin has gone. Anyway, this is where it gets really movie-like. The same time as these Bitcoin miners and hosters are popping up all over Iceland, its drug scene goes apeshit too. Loads of Icelanders start growing weed for pretty much the same reasons that the bitcoins do their thing.

An Icelandic weed becomes like a thing. By 2016, you've got Snoop Dog tweeting about quote, some of this Icelandic cush when he's there for a gig. And there's also a huge cocaine and MDMA problem in the country. It's got one of the highest use rates on earth and small-time crooks are getting massively rich smuggling stuff into Reykivik on the boats

and selling it for like massive markups. I mean, I don't really get stoned anymore, but if I did doing it on some glacier, watching the northern lights would be a pretty good place for it. Yeah, see, this is more our speed, I feel like. The crypto stuff, we were probably losing people, but now we're bringing it back home. Yeah.

Yeah, so this one guy that me and my co-writer met in Reykivik, he actually looked like a bulldog, right? This huge, Popeye arms, nose like a smashed cupcake. But also, typically Icelandic, played chess and spoke beautiful, like, loquacious English. He basically just bribed a few stevedores when he was a dealer. And he got huge packages of drugs, mostly from Spain and the Netherlands. And he made tons of cash.

So you've got the criminal worlds and the crypto worlds flourishing. And now in steps our man, Sindri Stephenson. He lives in his little town on the north side of the island, a long drive from Reykivik, where almost everyone in Iceland lives, by the way. And he gets in a bunch of trouble with drugs and petty theft. and he's clocked up 200 cases with local cops by the time he's 18, which basically means he's committing a log crime every few days, which I mean,

that's like Lance Armstrong rise and grind levels of cheery. It's impressive, but also it seems like he's really bad at doing crime. Like if you get caught dozens of times, maybe going the straight on narrow for a bit, because maybe you're not meant for that world. Yeah, I mean, he's basically just walking into the shop

and people are calling the cops right at this point. Yeah. So he gets into growing weed in this boom like we just spoke about, and he does all this stuff with his childhood friend, a guy named Haftor Loggy Hunson. And they just chase hires all the time. They steal people's purses. They're taking hard drugs.

They're pretty wild kids. And Haftor winds up this massively jacked Jim Bunny who goes by the name Haffy the Pink. Sindri gets into one bit of trouble too much in 2010 when he's 24. And he gets a four-month jail spell and a spot in rehab. Now, as you might imagine, these prisons, they're not like the ones in the US or the UK. They've got fully kitted out rooms, flat screen TVs.

I love how people always complain about the flat screen TVs. Like, that's the height of luxury. People can often roam around these places, or they can even visit town on the weekends. There's a big field for exercise. Like, it costs a lot to the taxpayer, but it's focused on rehabilitation rather than deterrent. And it seems to work, right? The reoffending rate is 27% in Iceland, which is way lower than pretty much any other developed country. It actually, it sounds like those rehabs that would cost you five grand a week somewhere in like Arizona or Southern California.

In reality, if that's what you want to do, you're better off flying to Iceland, it sounds like, and committing a bunch of crimes there and getting sent to theirs for free. You know what? I think there is an actual case of that happening. There was a guy who was like a thief in the States and he went to a Northern Ireland in Norway, robbed a bank really badly just so we could get put in jail there. I'm pretty sure that's true. I might be wrong. Yeah, even like writers are treats. Like, why bother?

You know, like, just go over to Iceland. Commit some crimes. You've got to stay in this room for a lot of time. You'll have no choice but to write, but there's TV. You know, actually the food's probably not great. But you know what I'm saying? Like, there's opportunity there. What we're recommending is for you to go to Iceland, commit crimes.

Do some crimes in Iceland. Yeah. And this is where I guess this is where it gets kind of sketchy as a journalist reporting a single case story, right? Which is kind of a bit of an outlier in the wider stats. So I remember my editorial team wanted to lean quite heavily on the soft prison terms on this piece and how it contributed to this crime wave, which I guess you have to mention with a big caveat like this is a country with very little violent crime and one which actually rehabs its criminals. Like there was one single murder in Iceland in 2018 and the Global Peace Index rates at the

world's most peaceful nation. But there is definitely a massive drugs problem. I think that the highest smokers of weed in the world, not that's an issue. but I think they're the highest per capita on other drugs as well. So maybe Iceland doesn't have the whole answer, but they're doing a way job, like way better job than elsewhere.

It's a bit of a toughie to unpick. And another interesting thing that it's not, is that it's not a crime to escape prison in Iceland. The whole reason the country exists is because slaves to Norway's, I know. The whole reason that Iceland exists, right, is because slaves to Norway's king fled in their boats in the 9th century,

And it still has this kind of like freedomy overtone in its culture. And its constitution says that it's natural for human beings to decide freedom, no matter the circumstances. And this one guy said to us, quote, we only have here in Iceland happy criminals. See, this is all far more interesting than crypto. I didn't even know that's how Iceland came to be, the Norway thing. Yeah, it's like super interesting.

Basically a bunch of like indentured servants went fuck this and just left Norway on a bunch of boats. So wait, if you escape from prison and get caught there, you just get back and like you don't get any additional time. You're just on your normal term. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Because they just assume that you would want to try and get free. So I guess if you don't want to get rehabilitated in these kind of like nice, fluffy prisons, then you just go for a wander. I don't know. Another guy we met, though, like he thought it was just breeding criminals, which I guess,

on the whole is what prison does in most countries, right? And he was a former drug dealer. He said, quote, people have to stay in prison for a few years. And the only thing they do is play PlayStation and use drugs and talk about crime. What's going to happen when you get out? So there you go. You've got both sides of that argument.

But when Sindry gets out, he decides he's really going to learn to code. And he makes some version of that flappy bird on the iPhone. You know that really annoying game? Like, it's made his previous unknown developer 18. million dollars a year, which, I mean, what are we doing in journalism? Anyway, Sindhry's getting into coding and he tries to get straight, he gets married, graduates in computer science, has three kids and drives a delivery van. So he's just turned into the King of Queens.

But he gets that itch, right? He told a Vanity Fair journalist, who, whose piece came out months after hours, by the way. That quote, I just needed more. Well, hello cryptocurrency. So by 2016, Haffy the Pink is this shaved-headed, roided up monster of a man. Like, he's fucking huge, this guy. And he's living on the Spanish coast, living large, as a drug smuggler. Somewhere along the line, Sindry gets in touch with a shady character known only as Mr. X,

who is an international gangster who he's talking to about getting into Bitcoin and making money while he sleeps, which, by the way, he told us is, quote, the dream. This is a funny story, by the way. We actually got through to Sindry while we were just like sitting in our hotel room one night. We had to share a twin room because the prices are insane out there. And we were just rifling for a bunch of company docs and some protein pill firm he'd set up out of the UK. Bear in mind he's in prison at this point, right? And I call up the number and he's like, hello, this is Sindri Stephenson.

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Never. So, Sindri is in touch with Mr. X. Haffy's in Spain. Mr. X is convincing Sindry that his plan to set up a Bitcoin mine. That's just tired. Robbing a bunch of server units is the wired option. Sindri reckons that he gets a load of these things, which look a bit like an old computer CPU stack, I guess.

He can make over $1.2 million a year. You mean in terms of mining? What he can dig out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So then Mr. X and Sindri start putting together their heist team.

Luckily, they already know a bunch of ne'er-do-wells from the drug industry, and they get big fellas, one name Matthias, the other nickname the Polish. And then there's another guy called QT and Haffy the Pink, and it's all getting a bit reservoir dogs here. They keep in touch on Telegram, because of course Telegram. And they have this Facebook group they all post to, which is less clever, called the Fellowship, which is a reference to Lord of the Rings, which is also pretty great. So by the end of December 2017, Sindhry's planning to move out to Spain with his young family.

Whether to be around Haffey or not isn't clear, but I mean, you can make your own minds up. And he actually enrolls him and his wife at Spanish College. So the getaway is pretty much sewn up. But the fellowship still has to pull off their heist. Well, actually, like a few heists. So first the team breaks into the Algrim Consulting Center in Asbury, remember the U.S. Naval Yard place, where they've got a security guard on the inside and they're wearing security outfits.

And despite these centres making millions and millions each year, there's barely anyone checking on them, which is very Icelandic. And the team makes off with 104 Bitcoin computers and a bunch of other techie stuff, like USB sticks, I don't know. And five days later, they have bought an attempt on the Borealis Center just down the road.

When an alarm, they tried gumming up with glue goes off. But they've already got enough of these things to kick off Mr. X's master plan and build a bootleg Bitcoin mine outside in the Icelandic wilderness. Wait, so whose plan was it? Was it Mr. X's plan or was it Sindry's plan? That's unclear. Like, we went through a bunch of the court documents and we kind of got an idea who Mr. X was.

Some kind of a, someone involved in a drug industry between sort of Scandinavia and southern Europe pretty much. Um, we've got a couple of names, but we couldn't publish it. But it's basically his idea and, and the thinking is, you know, like, the thinking is off the record, it's the three of them, Affi, Sinjory, and Mr. X that make up this grand plan. I'm assuming that like Mr. X, like if you're calling Mr. X, he hasn't been caught yet, right? He has not. No. And he couldn't be named.

People pretty much know who he is, but he's out of the country. And he managed to get away from it all. He wasn't dumb enough basically to leave his fingerprints and all of the digital stuff in a way that he was caught. With the digital stuff, like when they're stealing all this stuff, that's just it. Like, do you need passwords or to really know what you're doing tech-wise when you steal all this stuff? Not really. You just need to be a thief. It's just a good old-fashioned high story, really, with a bunch of crypto involved.

But now I guess people are listening to this for 26 minutes. They're going to be pretty much down the whole with it. But if Sindri Stephenson's life of crime has taught us anything, it's just that he can't resist the next big hit. And soon he gets win from an old college pal that there's a Bitcoin mine in this sleepy little town of Borgarnas, kind of between Reykjavik and his own hometown, right, on the West Coast. So when Sindri goes to check out this place, there's nothing. No security. And even the single cop in town who's on duty for the night, he's off. This place is barely a week old.

It's perfect, he thinks. Ten days after their successful heist, Sindri and the QT, they bombed down the road to Borgarnis in the used van they bought online, before breaking into the centre and stealing another 28 machines. Perfect crime, they think.

Only the pair makes a fatal error. In their haste to get away, they speed through a local tunnel. A camera clocks the both of them. When the police are alerted the next morning, they've got the two men by the Harries. Gross. That's a very British phrase.

The cops spend three days interrogating Sindry and the QT, but they wind up letting them go, like not enough evidence. Wow, doing crimes in Iceland really does sound amazing. Even if you do somehow get caught, you see to play Grand Theft Auto in the woods for three months, and they let you out. Yeah, they literally had a photo of these two guys driving a van through the tunnel.

Like, there's no one there, and they let him go. Anyway, 42 days later, guess what? The team strikes again. And this time it's their biggest, ice yet. Back out in Asbury, the old naval base, a huge place run by a company called Advania. Quote, it was exciting and fun and we wanted to do another one, Sindri tells a journalist, not me, annoyingly. This time they've got a security guy firmly on the inside, and he's indebted to Haffy. So the gang pulls up outside his home and threatens him unless he gives him

every bit of info about the Advania mine. Then on the night of the heist itself, the chief security guard gets diarrhea and the motion sensors on the place of security tech aren't even hooked up. Wait, I'm sorry. Hold up. So is that their insider guy who gets diarrhea, like fakes it or a different security guard? And like, how did this come out in the court trial? Like he had to get on the stand and say like, well, I couldn't do my job, you know, because everything else.

Yeah, I mean, this is another one of those things that came up in court and you're like, This really stinks of bullshit. But as far as the court understood it, it was just regular shit, I guess. And they bought it. But the security guard is another guy. But the chief guard also gets the squits and has to go off work allegedly. But anyway, whatever you believe, it's an open goal, right? A gang, again, they're dressed in security outfits from their guy on the inside.

They get to work pulling out all the prizes. 225 Bitcoin mining machines in total, worth over 300 grand, not to mention the Bitcoin they can mine when hooked up somewhere, which is a lot. And this time the whole country stands up and takes note. Cops get on the case, and the regional chief of police for Asbury, this wiry silver-haired guy called Oliver Kiatinson,

he gets to work tracking down the fellowship. He's like this super laid-back guy, very stereotypically Icelandic. He says he gets wind of load of information, down the sauna. I mean, you know this guy. He's basically in every Scandini noir show going. I liked him a lot personally. Dude, I have no idea what you're talking about. Scandi noir? Come on. This is like all anyone watches in the UK. Just like dark, weird, Scandinavian horror. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. And the security guard, the guy extorted to give out all the details of Varnia. He's the one that

sings first to the cops. And then they grab Sindhry, who's literally in the middle of moving from Iceland with his family, and he's got plans of the Advania centre in his jeans pocket. They find that he's rented the vehicle involved in his final heist, and his iPhone's got tons of stuff about the rest of the gang. So time's up, or, I mean, maybe not, if you look at what the cops had done before. This time, though, the cops keep Sindry and solitary confinement for a whole month in between interrogations.

He's actually kind of pretty mad. It came out a bunch of trial, and it caused a bit of a scandal, actually, about the human rights situation, but basically the cops have got their man and they're hoping to unravel the rest of the fellowship pretty soon. Except there's a couple of problems. One, nobody can find the machines. I mean, so many hundreds of these things worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions, and the gang has clearly hidden them somewhere out in the wilderness. Amazingly, cops use energy data, right, to see if there's a spike on the electricity grid somewhere, but they actually only end up finding a bunch of weed farms,

which also go heavy on electricity bill. So you see that like dovetailing of drugs and crypto again? It's pretty amazing that that happened. Anyway, then, Shinhua, is it Shinwa? I think that's it. China State News reports in April 2018 that 600 mining machines have been seized in a raid just outside Beijing, which pricks up Cartonsonson's, the cop's ears.

So he thinks they might be the one. but he just can't get through to these Chinese guys in Beijing and he gave us this great line about China quote it's just like swimming when the water is not clear you don't see that far wait I don't understand so now they think the fellowship didn't have the stolen machines in like the Icelandic wilderness they had actually moved them to China

yeah they thought that was the biggest league they had at the time and I guess given the fact that a lot of these guys were running drugs from like you know South America into Europe and and Canaanavian, fucking Iceland. Like, I guess they thought

they could maybe move these things around. I mean, it's a long shot. Yeah. Anyway, Kartinson told us

at the time that it was a significant heist because of its organization. He wouldn't point a finger directly at Haffee the Pink,

but he said, quote, there is a suspicion that it might have been that way. Although the crimes are different, they seem to have

a common trait, and that is that someone is the think tank and others are doing the hands-on jobs. So, wait,

there was a Yeah, I'm just, like, they thought the last heist was a different group potentially. Like they couldn't say that it was all the same people, all the fellowship. No, they, they thought it was the same guys. But I think by the third heist, they were starting to get a picture of who the guys in charge were and who the other guys were. So these guys like Matthias and the Polish and the QT, they're very much just the kind of brawn. And then you've got Haffy, Mr. X, and Sindry, they're the kind of brains of the, the operation. And I think that's what he's referring to there. Yeah.

Anyway, remember what I was saying about Iceland's prisons and people's right to freedom? Well, Sindri knows that too. And when the police put him in a so-called open prison outside Reckyivik, which is just a big farm, nice place actually, looked decent when we stopped by, a fellow inmate there who, if I recall right, had actually murdered somebody with an axe, he told us, again, on the phone, we just called him on his mobile. He told us that Sindhry was quote, quiet, good guy. There were no troubles, and he was very friendly. So he's quite a sympathetic character, to be honest.

Like, I found him quite sympathetic. And a lot of the country ends up kind of rooting for him, right? The outsider against these big, weird companies who've just muscled in on their territory. So one morning, Sindry leaps out of this prison window. He meets a pal in the car outside. Then they drive across the country's, like, stunning coastal road to the airport. where Sindhry dressed in a black hoodie, he jumps on a plane to Stockholm and another man's name. Weirdly, it's the same flight taking the Icelandic PM to a trade summit.

So the prime minister there flies commercial and the security is so non-existent that like a countrywide famous fugitive just gets on the flight with no problems under a fake name? Yes, on both counts. Yep. And then, so then Sindry lands in Sweden and he lays, low for a bit. He told us he just hated the system by that, at that point. Quote, I really just wanted to give them the finger. So in Sweden, Sindri lays low for a bit, and then he gets to Denmark. Then across Germany to Amsterdam, when he makes probably the biggest blunderer of the whole thing. Who's waiting for him in Amsterdam? Yep, that's right. Haffy the

pink, his old mate and drug dealer. And they pose for a selfie in Dam Square with the hashtag Team Sindry. Like, do we really need to say at this point, kids, don't IG your goddamn crimes. Yeah, I mean, especially if you're a fugitive. Did, like, nobody learned anything from Take A? This is just, you know, I'm starting to question, I'm starting to question whether they were actually the brains of the operation here. Yeah, it's all relative, right?

And just two hours after they do this, shock horror, a Dutch cop on a bicycle, because, of course, catches Sindry, and he lands in a Dutch jail for three weeks, begging for extradition. And I mean, I guess the Dutch flat. screens aren't quite up to scratch with the Icelandic ones and he wants out. Yeah, a bicycle cop is just, that's some wild northern European shit from start to finish. Oh, it's beautifully northern European. That's why I love this story so much.

Like, anyway, Sindri does head back to Iceland and he faces trial in December 2018, getting sentenced to four and a half years. And it seems at first glance that his protein pill company, the one that we called up and just randomly found his cell number, that still exists now, which is pretty crazy. So you can run a business behind bars? I don't know. And nobody caught or identified Mr. Exit court. And some people still think he's out there using the 550 machines that were stolen,

making millions off Bitcoin while its price continues to rocket. I mean, I'll tell you saying I'm pretty sure he's in Spain. This is a good line from the vanity piece, like Vanity Fair piece, by the way, whose journal Syndry tells, quote, maybe the computers have been running the whole time. maybe I know where they are. Maybe I do and maybe I don't. I mean, four and a half years,

and I'm sure they get out on good behavior earlier, like it seems kind of worth it. If they've got them running, they're making millions. Who do you think? Obviously, you couldn't write in the article because of legal reasons, but, you know,

they're not going to listen. The court's not listening to this. Who do you, like, off the record, I guess on the record here, like, what is the deal with Mr. X? Who do they think he is? Can you give us? us anything. Mr. X is a man from Iceland who has become quite a big name in running drugs

from South America into, oh shit, it's just like the whole story has just come back to me. So like Mr. X basically is a guy from Iceland who has become a very big name in a kind of, a system whereby MDMA made in Europe goes to South America to be shipped into the States and Coke made in South America goes into Europe to be shipped up to Scandinavia. He's a pretty big name. I don't want to say his name on the show, but if you look around, you'd probably find him. Anyway, that... Give us some letters, maybe?

We do like a Wheel of Fortune thing? You know what? I can't remember his name off the top of my head right now, but I do remember that he was named after some kind of a snack, like a chocolate bar or chips or something. something. He has like a really weird nickname. Yeah. I'm pretty sure you can find him. Youth sports families and fans huddle up. Wherever life takes you, game changer keeps you connected. Stream games live and full HD when you can't be there. Get play-by-play updates right on your phone and share game highlights with everyone, full bragging rights included.

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and their balsamic chicken salad. Available at the prepared foods counter. Get Summer Splash Savings Now at Whole Foods Market. So that's the heist done. But actually now, Iceland's drug problem is only worsened. So folks have graduated from Coke and MDMA to prescription drugs. And Bola Council, there seems to be a bit of an epidemic there last time I left looked. And there's another story my pal Pete and I picked up when we were out there too about this massive drug baron who got a weird come-up and stuff.

I really want to go back out there and do. So any editors listen to this, get in touch. And the Bitcoin stuff, it had a bit of a dip with a dip in price around the same time as the heist. But it's back and flying now actually uses way more energy than normal the houses in Iceland, which is pretty mad. And all that besides guys really visit Iceland. Like it's like another universe.

It's a crazy place. So that's the big Bitcoin heist. Pretty crazy story. Yeah, it does sound like too, if you do visit Iceland, you can kind of do whatever you want. Because if you get in trouble, you know, there's no real penalties there. No, no. I mean, you can probably get a PS4. I don't know if you're going to get a PS5 though. So you might want to think about that. Spend a couple months playing Grand Theft Auto. I mean, there's worse ways to spend your time. Oh yeah, for sure, for sure.

Anyway, thanks everyone for listening. Bonus episodes, if you want to support us more. Patreon.com slash the Underworld podcast. And, uh, yeah, stay tuned for next week. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings. There's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now at Bloomberg.com. When the job gets tough, you need equipment that's built to handle it.

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