A few weeks ago an Ottawa Bitcoin Brokerage was held up at gunpoint. I never got around to posting about it then so I will post about it now. I actually used to work at the brokerage last summer for about 3 months. I eventually left to concentrate on my home mining operations as well as trading and investing. When I worked there the thought did cross my mind that their physical security did not seem to be as large priority as their cyber security and it would likely be an easy target for an armed robbery.
Low and behold in January of this year 3 young males armed with hand guns stormed into the office at around 11:30am and held the employees at gunpoint asking for all the money from the safe as well as the Bitcoins to be transferred to their wallet. They even bound the employees that they saw but they overlooked the fact that one of the employees was in a back office calling the police. Because of this mistake the robbers ended up leaving empty handed after finding out the police were on their way.
I am very happy that no one was badly hurt and that the business did not have to take a financial loss to learn this lesson. Since the robbery, renovations have been made and a new system has been put in place only allowing walk ins from 1pm till 3pm and only one customer at a time. Hopefully these changes along with any other improvements I have not been made aware of are enough to prevent this kind of attempt from happening again in the future.
Here is Peter form Decentralized TV talking about the story:
Also here is a news story from CTV Ottawa local news that I recorded the day after the attempt. I apologized for the bad camera work I did not originally intend to upload this video but decided to after all: