Wilmington Police department request public assistance for dog theft investigation
As the Wilmington police department continue their investigation, they are now requesting public assistance to an armed robbery that took place in Wilmington Delaware. Police say they were dispatched to the 4100 block of North West Street in reference to a burglary that took place on May 30th at approximately 1:14 a.m. Homeowner Jahmeir Snow reported that only his 2-year-old French bulldog 'Tooty" was in the home at the time of the robbery. Snow says normally he would take 'Tooty" with him to work, but he left her home because she is in heat. Reports say that the intruder broke a door to gain entry to the home and once inside shots were fired for an unknown reason. In addition to taking the young French Bulldog the robber also had taken electronics, shoes, clothes, and important documents. Police are asking that anyone with information about this incident is encouraged to contact Detective Jessica Gledhill of the WPD Criminal Investigations Division at (302) 576-3667. PHL17's Tyrone Sharper gives a live report from the PHL17 studio.
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CNBC
3 hours ago
- CNBC
'Bitcoin Family' hides crypto codes etched onto metal cards on four continents after recent kidnappings
A wave of high-profile kidnappings targeting cryptocurrency executives has rattled the industry — and prompted a quiet security revolution among some of its most visible evangelists. Didi Taihuttu, patriarch of the so-called "Bitcoin Family," said he overhauled the family's entire security setup after a string of threats. The Taihuttus — who sold everything they owned in 2017, from their house to their shoes, to go all-in on bitcoin when it was trading around $900 — have long lived on the outer edge of crypto ideology. They travel full-time with their three daughters and remain entirely unbanked. Over the past eight months, he said, the family ditched hardware wallets in favor of a hybrid system: Part analog, part digital, with seed phrases encrypted, split, and stored either through blockchain-based encryption services or hidden across four continents. "We have changed everything," Taihuttu told CNBC on a call from Phuket, Thailand. "Even if someone held me at gunpoint, I can't give them more than what's on my wallet on my phone. And that's not a lot." CNBC first reported on the family's unconventional storage system in 2022, when Taihuttu described hiding hardware wallets across multiple continents — in places ranging from rental apartments in Europe to self-storage units in South America. As physical attacks on crypto holders become more frequent, even they are rethinking their exposure. This week, Moroccan police arrested a 24-year-old suspected of orchestrating a series of brutal kidnappings targeting crypto executives. One victim, the father of a crypto millionaire, was allegedly held for days in a house south of Paris — and reportedly had a finger severed during the ordeal. In a separate case earlier this year, a co-founder of French wallet firm Ledger and his wife were abducted from their home in central France in a ransom scheme that also targeted another Ledger executive. Last month in New York, authorities said, a 28-year-old Italian tourist was kidnapped and tortured for 17 days in a Manhattan apartment by attackers trying to extract his bitcoin password — shocking him with wires, beating him with a gun, and strapping an Apple AirTag around his neck to track his movements. The common thread: The pursuit of crypto credentials that enable instant, irreversible transfers of virtual assets. "It is definitely frightening to see a lot of these kidnappings happen," said JP Richardson, CEO of crypto wallet company Exodus. He urged users to take security into their own hands by choosing self-custody, storing larger sums on hardware wallets, and — for those holding significant assets — exploring multi-signature wallets, a setup typically used by institutions. Richardson also recommended spreading funds across different wallet types and avoiding large balances in hot wallets to reduce risk without sacrificing flexibility. That rising sense of vulnerability is fueling a new demand for physical protection with insurance firms now racing to offer kidnap and ransom (K&R) policies tailored to crypto holders. But Taihuttu isn't waiting for corporate solutions. He's opted for complete decentralization — of not just his finances, but his personal risk profile. As the family prepares to return to Europe from Thailand, safety has become a constant topic of conversation. "We've been talking about it a lot as a family," Taihuttu said. "My kids read the news, too — especially that story in France, where the daughter of a CEO was almost kidnapped on the street." Now, he said, his daughters are asking difficult questions: What if someone tries to kidnap us? What's the plan? Though the girls carry only small amounts of crypto in their personal wallets, the family has decided to avoid France entirely. "We got a little bit famous in a niche market — but that niche is becoming a really big market now," Taihuttu said. "And I think we'll see more and more of these robberies. So yeah, we're definitely going to skip France." Even in Thailand, Taihuttu recently stopped posting travel updates and filming at home after receiving disturbing messages from strangers who claimed to have identified his location from YouTube vlogs. "We stayed in a very beautiful house for six months — then I started getting emails from people who figured out which house it was. They warned me to be careful, told me not to leave my kids alone," he said. "So we moved. And now we don't film anything at all." "It's a strange world at the moment," he said. "So we're taking our own precautions — and when it comes to wallets, we're now completely hardware wallet-less. We don't use any hardware wallets anymore." The family's new system involves splitting a single 24-word bitcoin seed phrase — the cryptographic key that unlocks access to their crypto holdings — into four sets of six words, each stored in a different geographic location. Some are kept digitally through blockchain-based encryption platforms, while others are etched by hand into fireproof steel plates using a hammer and letter punch, then hidden in physical locations across four continents. "Even if someone finds 18 of the 24 words, they can't do anything," Taihuttu explained. On top of that, he's added a layer of personal encryption, swapping out select words to throw off would-be attackers. The method is simple, but effective. "You only need to remember which ones you changed," he said. Part of the reason for ditching hardware wallets, Taihuttu said, was a growing mistrust of third-party devices. Concerns about backdoors and remote access features — including a controversial update by Ledger in 2023 — prompted the family to abandon physical hardware altogether in favor of encrypted paper and steel backups. While the family still holds some crypto in "hot" wallets — for daily spending or to run their algorithmic trading strategy — those funds are protected by multi-signature approvals, which require multiple parties to sign off before a transaction can be executed. The Taihuttus use Safe — formerly Gnosis Safe — for ether and other altcoins, and similarly layered setups for bitcoin stored on centralized platforms like Bybit. About 65% of the family's crypto is locked in cold storage across four continents — a decentralized system Taihuttu prefers to centralized vaults like the Swiss Alps bunker used by Coinbase-owned Xapo. Those facilities may offer physical protection and inheritance services, but Taihuttu said they require too much trust. "What happens if one of those companies goes bankrupt? Will I still have access?" he said. "You're putting your capital back in someone else's hands." Instead, Taihuttu holds his own keys — hidden across the globe. He can top up the wallets remotely with new deposits, but accessing them would require at least one international trip, depending on which fragments of the seed phrase are needed. The funds, he added, are intended as a long-term pension to be accessed only if bitcoin hits $1 million — a milestone he's targeting for 2033. The shift toward multiparty protections extends beyond just multi-signature. Multi-party computation, or MPC, is gaining traction as a more advanced security model. Instead of storing private keys in one place — a vulnerability known as a "single point of compromise" — MPC splits a key into encrypted shares distributed across multiple parties. Transactions can only go through when a threshold number of those parties approve, sharply reducing the risk of theft or unauthorized access. Multi-signature wallets require several parties to approve a transaction. MPC takes that further by cryptographically splitting the private key itself, ensuring that no single individual ever holds the full key — not even their own complete share. The shift comes amid renewed scrutiny of centralized crypto platforms like Coinbase, which recently disclosed a data breach affecting tens of thousands of customers. Taihuttu, for his part, says 80% of his trading now happens on decentralized exchanges like Apex — a peer-to-peer platform that allows users to set buy and sell orders without relinquishing custody of their funds, marking a return to crypto's original ethos. While he declined to reveal his total holdings, Taihuttu did share his goal for the current bull cycle: a $100 million net worth, with 60% still held in bitcoin. The rest is a mix of ether, layer-1 tokens like solana, link, sui, and a growing number of AI and education-focused startups — including his own platform offering blockchain and life-skills courses for kids. Lately, he's also considering stepping back from the spotlight. "It's really my passion to create content. It's really what I love to do every day," he said. "But if it's not safe anymore for my daughters ... I really need to think about them."
Los Angeles Times
14 hours ago
- Los Angeles Times
Where Jonathan Gold found spicy comfort food in Koreatown
Sun Nong Dan is a specialist in sullungtang, a gentle broth made by boiling beef bones for hours, even days, until the liquid turns a shimmering, pearlescent white that is pretty much the opposite of what French chefs are taught in cooking school. The soup is fatless and softly fragrant, not quite as rich as the soup at fellow specialist Han Bat, but with a sturdy mineral spine and a sensation that you are getting healthier with each sip. When you first sip sullungtang, you may recoil at its blandness until somebody remembers to tell you that you are supposed to add sea salt and chopped scallions from canisters on the table. A sullungtang restaurant will always have vivid radish pickles on the table; I think it may be a law. If you are so inclined you can dribble some of the tart, spicy brining liquid into the broth, although I never quite think the lovely, beefy version at Sun Nong Dan quite needs it. You can supplement the dish with sliced brisket, the chewy boiled cartilage from ox knees or soft chunks of beef-cheek meat. You can also get a clear, milder broth or order the meats on a separate, nicely arranged platter. Sullungtang has a reputation as a soothing morning-after restorative, perfect both after an evening of hard drinking and as an early-morning palliative. It is not an accident that the restaurant, whose name derives from a historic name for sullungtang, is open 24 hours each day. But the throng in that Koreatown strip mall — it's not there for the ox bone soup. Ox bone soup is not why you stand patiently outside while the excellent noodle shops, stew merchants and seafood parlors that surround it are half-empty. (The hosts seem to take special glee in crossing out the names of supplicants who are not present when their parties are called.) It is not ox-bone soup that New York chef David Chang posts to the zillion followers of his Instagram feed or has been known to eat twice a day when he's in town. When you finally straggle into the cramped dining room, possibly 90 minutes after you first scrawled your name on a clipboard, it is not ox bone soup that you see on every table, not ox bone soup at the center of awkward first dates and not ox bone soup that causes everyone to whip out their phones when the food comes. The waiter will stand patiently at the table while you try to decipher the menu printed on your paper place mat, trying to figure out if a place that offers a choice between boiled ox knee and boiled cow head was really what you had in mind. Because he knows that you are going to settle on the same short rib stew that everybody else in the restaurant is eating, at least everybody under the age of 50. Sullungtang has a definite place in the ecosystem, and you should definitely order a pot to kill time until the main dish comes, but that short rib stew, galbi jjim, is just killer. So you nibble on the side dishes, which include that turnip kimchi, a rather wonderful plate of bristly Korean chives with chile, and an extremely pungent traditional cabbage kimchi. You will be asked if you'd like white or brown rice: Go for the latter, which is steamed with purple beans. The one listed appetizer is steamed dumplings, which aren't bad when the kitchen hasn't run out of them. The sullungtang is light and nourishing; I suggest the one with brisket unless you really like the chaw of kneecap. A bit of time elapses — the restaurant is temporarily without an alcohol license, although the walls are decorated with ads for beer and soju. And then the galbi jjim hits the table, hissing and sputtering in a heavy stone pot nearly the size and heft of your emergency spare, a mountain of meat and vegetables rising out of a violently red lagoon of broth, enveloped in its own small universe of steam. Galbi jjim is one of the standards of refined Korean cuisine, a favorite in the old royal courts and often served on Chuseok, which is more or less the Korean equivalent of Thanksgiving. If your grandmother loves you, she might prepare galbi jjim on a Sunday afternoon, and the house will smell wonderful, of meat, soy and sweetness. Galbi jjim is a symbol of prosperity — the cut of beef is not inexpensive, and the dish takes several hours to prepare. I am quite fond of the traditional versions in Koreatown restaurants like Soban and Seongbukdong. Well-made galbi jjim is robust yet delicate, fragile but spoon-tender, flavored with pine nuts and jujube dates. The galbi jjim at Sun Nong Dan is Hendrix shredding a Bob Dylan song or David Choe slapping paint onto a wall, all the sensations of the dish run through a distortion pedal and cranked up to 10. You'll be getting the dish extra-spicy (although the waiter will try to talk you out of it), and the amount of garlic that will seep out of your pores afterward is almost surreal. The pot that it comes in is hot enough and thick enough to crisp the cylinders of rice noodles, tteok, put a light char on the meat and keep the scarlet braising sauce bubbling long enough to reduce to a thick, insanely flavorful sludge that both coats and saturates the turned carrots and potatoes. If you have ordered it with cheese — you have to order it with cheese — a waiter scoops a big handful of white gratings over the top and bazookas it with a torch, creating several small fireballs along the way for effect until the mass breaks down into oozing, char-flecked rivulets that stretch from your chopsticks like pizza goo. 'What kind of cheese is this?'' I asked. 'Cheese,'' the waiter replied.
Yahoo
17 hours ago
- Yahoo
Queens dogs stolen after bizarre botched robbery
What started as a robbery caper in Queens quickly turned into a dognapping disaster, cops said. A desperate dog lover is trying to track down his precious purloined pooches days after an armed thieves tried to rob him and his friend on a Queens street, but ended up swiping the man's pets. The 31-year-old victim managed to get away from the would-be captors, but the suspects got hold of the victim's phone — and the keys to his apartment. Hours later, the crooks let themselves into the victim's home, and walked off with about $6,000 worth of clothes — and two French bulldogs, cops said. 'I was thinking I was going to die,' the dog owner, who wished not to be named, told the Daily News. Police have released surveillance images of the two crooks in the hopes that someone recognizes them. The thieves did not know either the dog owner or his friend, but were trying to maximize their score by forcing one victim to reach out to the other, a police source with knowledge of the case said. The ordeal began Saturday along Crane St., a small, one-block-long stretch in Long Island City, when the two suspects approached the dog owner's 27-year-old friend, who was on a bike, and forced him into a car at gunpoint, cops said. After punching him several times, the crooks took his iPhone and about $800, then used the phone to text the dog owner, who the bike rider was heading over to meet. A short time later, the unsuspecting dog owner appeared. He was also forced into the car, where he was beaten and robbed. But he managed to escape, just as one of the robbers was trying to bind him with zip ties, he recalled. 'I grabbed the gun and started punching and fighting one of them,' he said about his ordeal. 'The other guy jumped into the car and we were all fighting for the gun. They were screaming, 'Shoot him! Shoot him!'' The dog owner managed to get out of the car and run across the street. 'They panicked and sped off,' he said. 'I dropped my phone and my keys.' As for his friend, he said the robbers later pushed him out of the car in Bedford-Stuyvesant. The dog owner went to his sister's house to decompress after the robbery. But by the time he got home, he realized he had been robbed again, he said. The thieves managed to figure out that the dog owner lived on the block where the robbery occurred and took something far more valuable to him than his phone. They took his two best friends. The thieves pretended to be delivering food in the building to get past the doorman as they made their way up to his apartment. They left with the dogs shortly before their victim returned home, the victim said. 'We just missed each other by minutes. They were caught on video,' the dog owner said. No arrests have been made. 'I find it difficult to talk about them because it makes me want to cry,' he added. 'I feel like I failed my dogs, I haven't been able to eat because I think of my dogs not being fed.' Gone are Cookie Monster, a 4-year-old male bulldog, and Pinky, a 3-year-old female. Their owner has been posting pictures on local streets and all across social media. 'I've been doing as much as I can,' he said. 'I just want my kids back.' Cops recovered surveillance images of the two suspects. One is described as between 20 and 25, around 5-foot-8 and about 180 pounds. He was last seen wearing a Chicago Bulls cap, a black surgical mask and a black sweater. His partner is in his late 20s, around 6 feet tall and about 220 pounds. He was last seen wearing a gray baseball cap and a gray sweater. Anyone with information regarding their whereabouts is urged to call NYPD Crime Stoppers at (800) 577-TIPS. All calls will be kept confidential.
