A YouTuber who said he’s an entrepreneur and a motivational speaker was sentenced to 50 years in prison for kidnapping a woman and then demanding about $100,000 in Bitcoin as a ransom.
Mexican streamer Germán Loera was one of six people to abduct a woman off a Chihuahua City street in 2018, and the gang took her to a house rented by the YouTuber, according to Metro. Loera then demanded 2 million pesos for the release of the woman.
Ultimately, she was rescued a few days later by police, and Loera was one of the men to be arrested.
The Chihuauhua district attorney told reporters that Loera, who was the mastermind behind the heist, had tried negotiating for the ransom online and that he was “a very experienced person in internet communications.” Police found the women because of the digital footprint left by the kidnappers through Bitcoin.
Officials also told reporters that a few weeks before the kidnapping, the headless body of Loera’s father was discovered outside of a funeral home, and it could have been a result of a clash between members of two drug cartels.
Loera has about 5,000 YouTube subscribers and more than 23,000 Twitter followers, but he racked up tens of thousands of views on some of his videos—fueled in part by his recent arrest—including one in which he gave a keynote speech to the 2017 World Congress of Young Leaders for Peace.
On the description of that YouTube video, which received nearly 100,000 views, he wrote, “If you can’t find your dream job, create it and share it with a team! Remember that before entrepreneurs, engineers, graduates or employees of a company, we are human. We must treat others and ourselves as such, regardless of the position held.”
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