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Late last month, a shoeless and injured cryptocurrency investor fled from a posh Manhattan townhouse and approached the NYPD with a mortifying story: He’d just escaped 17 straight days of torture, having been held in SoHo and peed upon , forced to smoke crack, pistol-whipped, shocked with a Taser, cut with a saw, and dangled over a ledge. All because two fellow crypto enthusiasts, whom he personally knew, desired access to his multimillion-dollar Bitcoin fortune—and were willing to do anything to make him give up the password to his virtual wallet.

With the information provided by this battered trader—a 28-year-old Italian named Michael Valentino Teofrasto C

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