How to Not Be Worth Kidnapping by Ryan Lackey | Devcon Bogotá

foreign [Music] hi I'm Ryan Lackey with evertots insurance we're going to talk about a few things but what we're not going to talk about is how not to be kidnapped because I mean it's everyone has a different threat profile everyone has different risks so it's really hard to give advice that's going to be really successful in your case and the world's unpredictable the world changes the most dangerous time is when you're going from like one level of assumptions to another level of assumptions and also this isn't legal advice I'm not a lawyer but you really would not want to take any security advice from lawyers generally lawyers have this amazing habit of they use magical legal privilege dust to protect like anything so because something is illegal you can't do it so as a result no one has to worry about it so yeah so the security advice I think security and Engineering is probably a better approach there so kidnapping in general kidnapping sucks it happens like it's really hard to get statistics but it happens like I'd say 25 30 000 times a year and then the number value of Ransom payments is really hard to estimate it's I mean I've seen numbers anywhere from like 500 million dollars this year to like five billion dollars so let's just say two billion dollars a year in advance and payments the real economic loss is definitely higher than that because the ransoms are only a small portion of it and the rate of this has increased a lot like the the most monitored period I know about is from 2000 to 2010 I think a lot of that increase where it basically doubled was due to the Iraq War and a lot of kidnappings in that place but it's really hard to get incident reports because a lot of the smaller scale things people don't report or they're reported to local authorities and not collected in any sort of centralized way so there's a lot of that stuff and it's usually like certain industries and certain geographies are very very overrepresented in those statistics uh like a software engineer in Palo Alto California has a very low risk of this a oil oil and gas executive working in like Nigeria has a much higher risk people were working as security contractors in dangerous countries unfortunately Colombia has had a history where it did have a relatively High rate of kidnappings in the past and has had some fluctuations since so this is really like a not really a uniformly distributed uh risk there's a lot of different types of incidents so jovivo in Puerto Rico pero uh Joe hablo Poco espanol but there's Express kidnappings or Paseo million not Mio nario which is the millionaires ride so the idea is able to kidnap you in a car and take you to an ATM and say take out all the money you can take out of the ATM and usually let you go and that's like a pretty it's it's bad it's sort of on the spectrum of someone stealing your cell phone or a robbery but it does have the threat of physical violence involved so it's a little bit worse a team of kidnappings are actually child custody like a non-custodial parent who's lost custody of a child will take or retain the child passed and approved monitoring period so that and turns into a kidnapping and it's sort of crazy there's the custodial kidnapping where they take somebody and they hold them for a period of time until somebody pays a ransom that's one category we can talk about there's the political kidnappings where a group is unhappy with the government or with another another entity and decides to kidnap people as a way to put pressure on that other entity the the external entity like the government people that are involved in illegal activities or certain violent Industries are at a much higher risk of kidnapping than people that are involved in like normal things unfortunately also that affects like the someone kind of I'd say the worst and the best people so people that are doing charity work in places like Haiti there's a bunch of nuns that were kidnapped while they were doing uh like relief work there and they want a 17 million dollar ransom for a group of nuns and that's not really feasible for them to pay so there's that there was the whole thing off of Somalia where there was the piracy there's the same thing in the Straits of Malacca and other places where ships are basically piracy and the crew is held kidnapping there's a virtual kidnapping which is crazy so so someone gets emails saying oh your wife has been kidnapped she's at a conference and the guy immediately like he loves his wife and he pays the ransom immediately and then it turns out his wife wasn't actually kidnapped and it was just all like fake and he just paid a bunch of money for this and there's that but the thing that's maybe more relevant to us is something that happened in um mostly like the 1800s bank managers where they had Banks back then had huge amounts of gold in their vaults so like every little local bank had huge amounts like multi uh like very very large amounts of money stored in local vaults and this is very liquid very stalable and they would kidnap a bank manager at night when a place are not as in the bank's empty and everything else they would then take the bank manager of the branch and say unlock the bank vault and then take the money out and that's not really great because it was a very profitable thing and it kept happening over and over again so uh what they did is they invented the time lock for safe so the safe could only open during business hours when people are going to be in in the bank and that's kind of like kind of relevant to what we're talking about here so why should we care like most of us are not like oil and gas Executives or doing missionary work or anything like that but we do work in an industry that has some some risks that are very specific to the industry so that blockchains are great but they're instant final transfers and that's the same as uh that's like the worst possible model for for Crime because someone can can accomplish a crime and then they're done there is there's some great talks that I've seen on how you have to launder the proceeds of crime but that is a very very good problem to have once you have the cash versus the problem of if you've stolen money from a bank and it can just be revoked by the we're still an electronic bank balance deposits and they just get revoked by the bank it's a very large amount of wealth there's people who have come in and also people that are new entrants to being wealthy that have come in with like more money than they ever had in the past and very recently and uh it's geographically distributed in places that are very high risk relative to a lot of previous economic booms and a lot of people have like a lifestyle it's kind of hard to secure I have a very boring lifestyle like I live in my house I go to my office my office has 24 7 armed security my apartment is very secure I don't really go out all that much and things like that but like people that go out to clubs and bars and everything else they can't really have security with them 24 7 and it's like they are not willing to make that sacrifice I think basically old people are willing to do that younger people are not so so it's kind of a risk in the crypto industry there's some basic precautions that everyone can take like uh normal physical security I mean there's a lot of teams here that have that have come that actually paid for um our armed security armored cars driving around it's not because of the getting the phone snatched off the street it's because they're afraid of targeted threats against them as as companies avoid risk and everything else but the crazy thing is this thing called kidnap and Ransom Insurance the problem with kidnapping Ransom insurance is if you advertise that you have kidnap and Ransom Insurance uh that makes you a Target because they know they're going to get a guaranteed payout so most of these programs have a program that you're not allowed to actually advertise that you have it um because one thing worse than being kidnapped for crypto that you do have is being kidnapped for crypto that you don't have there's all sorts of ways you can set up great multi-cigs and custody arrangements and use custodians and everything else so you don't actually have access to the crypto to steal but or to make a transfer but once you do get kidnapped it becomes a serious problem so so the problem is you need to convince the dumbest possible kidnapper in the world that this system is in place that you don't actually have instant access to the funds or access to the funds alone and um that's pretty hard because very few people that are going to be kidnapping people attend conferences like this and learn about the The Cutting Edge of custody arrangements and everything else so the solution I think is I mean hopefully the solution I think is actually you get this into the mainstream so you build something that has a custody Arrangement that prevents someone from being Ransom successful or being having keys you successfully into mainstream media like a Hollywood movie find incidents where it's a popular incident and basically have those that mechanism foil the crime and have it widely known and publicized into that there's also some novel Insurance products and there's also the government approach here which I'm sure a lot of people don't really like government Government Solutions but certain governments the US Israel a few other countries have a policy of not paying ransoms for people they send in people to go try to rescue them not always successful other countries have a policy of paying ransoms like a lot of European countries do and their people get kidnapped and Ransom successfully so sort of a trade-off but thank you very much um yeah anyone has any questions happy to answer questions