116 VANITY FAIR DECEMBER 2019
arrested Ste-
fansson and Karlsson. In their gentle Ice-
landic style, they placed the suspects in
dormitory-style cells in their hometowns,
then brought them in for questioning. “We
never call it interrogation,” an officer tells me.
Later, I am given a tour of the “conversa-
tion room” where Karlsson was questioned.
It’s furnished with a comfy couch, a fluffy
blanket, and a box of Kleenex in case of a
tearful confession. The walls are covered
with images of the Northern Lights and the
buds of Icelandic flowers poking up through
the snowy tundra. “It’s a calm space,” Detec-
tive Helgi Petur Ottensen assures me.
Ottensen was impressed with how nice
the suspects seemed. Viktor Jonasson was
“polite.” Karlsson was “very clean, calm.”
The electrician who tipped off Stefansson
about the Bitcoin mine was “just a pawn. He
had no idea his information would lead to a
burglary, and they used him.”
Questioned by police, Stefansson and
Karlsson insisted that they had absolutely
nothing to do with the burglary. And so, after
three days of “conversation,” they were free
to leave—told, in essence, have a nice day.
“We didn’t have anything else on them,”
the detective says, “so they were released.”
But the Bitcoin thieves were far from
finished. While being detained in the Bor-
garnes investigation, Karlsson lost his job
as a day care worker. Deep in debt, and with
a child on the way, he blamed Stefansson.
So Stefansson came up with a solution: He
would find a role in another burglary for
Karlsson, which would “help him out of
this shit.” In fact, they would stage their
biggest heist yet. “It was exciting and fun,
and we wanted to do another one,” Stefans-
son recalls. “Just one more, to get a bigger
mining facility.”
On the day after Christmas, cell phone
records show, the gang drove together to the
former naval base at Asbru to try their luck
at hitting the Borealis Data Center a second
time. This time they tried to climb through a
window. The alarm sounded, and they fled.
But the gang was learning as they went.
The electrician in the Borgarnes burglary
had worked so well, they decided to seek
an insider at another data center—someone
who could be persuaded to give them all of
the mine’s security details.
One night in late 2017, a man named Ivar
Gylfason received a strange phone call. “Are
you a security guard at the Advania data cen-
ter?” the caller demanded.
“Yes,” Gylfason replied. The caller abrupt-
ly hung up.
Not long after, Gylfason was contacted by
a relative of his ex-girlfriend. The relative,
it turned out, owed money to Stefansson’s
friend, Haffi the Pink. The gang had present-
ed him with a plan for repayment: Get Ivar
to spill security details about the Advania mine
and the interest on your debt will be forgiven.
The relative offered Gylfason cash in
exchange for information about the mine.
When Gylfason declined, he was escorted
into a dark Mazda outside his house. He
recognized one of the men in the car—Sindri
Stefansson—who sat alongside a man wear-
ing a hoodie, and another who spoke in a
gruff Eastern European accent.
“Give us the info—or else,” the men
demanded. If he did not comply, they told
him, he would be hurt.
Over the course of two or three moonlit
meetings, Gylfason told the gang everything
he knew about the Advania data center: the
location of the security cameras, the specifics
of the anti-theft systems, how security shifts
were organized. He also provided the thieves
with guard uniforms and the alarm code.
On January 16, 2018, the job commenced.
Stefansson had been tracking the routine of
the security guard who would be on duty that
night. “I was watching his movements,” he
says. “I knew where he lived.” The night of
the burglary, Stefansson planned to set off
an alarm at a nearby data center to divert
the guard. But before he could make a move,
the gang got a lucky break: The guard sud-
denly raced home, diverted by diarrhea, and
never returned.
Then came another gift: The motion
detectors at the data center weren’t even
connected to the alarm system.
“Great, this is perfect,” Haffi the Pink
texted.
“We love this,” Stefansson added.
“Best in the fucking world!” Haffi texted
back.
With scarves covering their faces, Karls-
son and his brother drove up and started
loading the computers into their car. Then
they were gone, along with 225 Bitcoin
computers: enough to open their own
mine and embark on a new life in Iceland’s
new economy.“Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a
man of wealth and taste.”
Ólafur Helgi Kjartansson was sitting in his
office in Reykjavík, belting out “Sympathy for
the Devil.” In his spare time, Kjartansson fol-
lows the Rolling Stones to concerts aroundthe world; he considers himself the band’s
number one fan in Iceland. But for now, Mick
and Keith would have to wait: As one of the
country’s most illustrious police chiefs, Kjar-
tansson was in charge of cracking the case of
the Big Bitcoin Heist.
At first, police had little to go on. “We
couldn’t follow the money,” Kjartansson
says. The computers were gone, and there
was no way to trace if they were being
used to mine cryptocurrency. So he and
his team turned to more old-fashioned
forms of technology: Using telephone data,
rental car records, bank accounts, and wire-
taps, they were able to connect the gang
with Ivar Gylfason, the security guard they
had blackmailed.
Only two weeks after the heist, the arrests
began. Gylfason, apprehended at his home,
confessed to his role. He told police about
Stefansson and the “two other guys” who
threatened him. That same day, police
arrested Karlsson and his brother. They also
descended on Stefansson, who had sold his
home and was preparing to move to Spain
with his wife and kids. He was arrested in
front of his in-laws’ house in Reykjavík,
where police found his possessions loaded
on a pallet in preparation for his getaway. In
a pocket of his jeans they found a crudely
drawn map of the Advania data center. They
also seized his iPhone, which was shipped
to Holland to be unlocked. Rental car forms
showed he had rented the second car used
in the Advania theft.
This time, with the future of the crypto-
currency industry at stake, police dispensed
with the “conversation room.” Gone were the
cozy couch and the comfy blanket. Stefans-
son was thrown in solitary for a month and
grilled repeatedly by police, who pressured
him to reveal the location of the stolen com-
puters. “They were rough!” Stefansson says.
“They were punishing me for not giving up
the computers.”
Officers from every police district in Ice-
land combed the island, searching for the
computers. They fanned out in squad cars,
boats, and helicopters. They followed leads
as far away as China. They raided a Bit-
coin mine owned by a Russian couple they
suspected of being the thieves. And they
descended on buildings where electricity
usage spiked to Bitcoin levels. Unfortunate-
ly, such power surges are also common in
Iceland’s other prevalent industry: pot farm-
ing. “The police broke down a lot of doors
looking for the computers,” says Stefansson.
Stefansson denied any involvement in
the heists. But he had made a critical error.
While he had instructed his crew to delete
everything from their phones, he hadn’t
deleted his own messages. His iPhone,
unlocked by police, contained a road map of
the crimes. “All the proofs lay on the table,”
the chief says.Bitcoin Heist
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