U.K. police are seeking witnesses after armed men broke into a family home and forced a bitcoin trader to transfer holdings of the digital currency.
According to reports, police say that the robbery took place in the picturesque Oxfordshire village of Moulsford, England, where 30-year-old Danny Aston and his partner, 31-year-old Amy Jay, were held at gunpoint, reports the Evening Standard. This is believed to be the first bitcoin heist in the U.K.
Thames Valley Police said that nobody was injured during what they believe what a ‘targeted’ incident. At the moment, the investigation is in the early stages with no arrests having been made.
The news of this comes at a time when the crypto market is becoming a topic of heated discussion, particularly at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Nobel-prize winning economist, Robert Shiller, recently spoke out against bitcoin by arguing that it doesn’t have a future in our lives. At the World Economic Forum, he said that while it was ‘an interesting experiment, it’s not a permanent feature of our lives.’
Stephen Poloz, the governor of the Bank of Canada, voiced his negative views claiming that trading in the cryptocurrency was similar to ‘gambling.’ Whereas, Cecilia Skingsley, deputy governor at the Swedish Central Bank, said that bitcoin isn’t even a currency. Speaking in Davos, she said:
[Cryptocurrencies] don’t meet criteria to be called money: they don’t store value, they fluctuate, and they’re not at a stable rate of exchange.
Regulators around the world are even calling for the digital currency market to be regulated. This is amid concerns of heightened interest from retail and institutional investors, growing fears that the market is in a bubble, and that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are being used by criminals. Last Friday, it was reported that Tokyo-based digital currency exchange Coincheck had been hacked into, resulting in the loss of over $500 million worth of XEM, the token for the NEM network. Since the theft, Coincheck have vowed to reimburse 260,000 customers that lost money on the exchange.
As a result of increasing interest China and South Korea are just two countries that are cracking down on the market in a bid to curb trader interest in what is considered a volatile market.
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