town” pockmarked by “car rental places
and trash yards.” To Streng, it looked like
the new cryptocurrency frontier.
Iceland was rich in everything that
Streng needed to mine Bitcoins. There
were plenty of empty warehouses to
house his computers at absurdly low
rents. There was cheap geothermal
energy, literally rising from the earth,
to power them. There was what he calls
“the most important part of the Bitcoin
world”—a consistently cold climate to
keep the machines from overheating as
they mine cryptocurrency 24/7. And in a
country with almost no crime, there was
little need to spend money on extensive
security measures.
Within six months, Streng trans-
formed an abandoned building on
the former base—an old U.S. military
lacquering garage—into Iceland’s first
Bitcoin mine. Every time someone
in the world made a purchase using
a Bitcoin, Streng’s operation joined a
global network of computers that raced
to verify and secure the transaction
with an encrypted algorithm. Whoever
cracked the code first received a Bit-
coin in return—a payment, at its peak,
worth $17,000 for just a few minutes of
computing time.
The success of Streng’s operation,
which grew into the world’s largest Bit-
coin company, attracted other miners to
Asbru. “Suddenly,” Streng says, “there
were fans on the roofs of other buildings
down the road”—a sure sign of mining
operations. Commercial miners arrived
from Asia and Eastern Europe. Today,
Bitcoin mines consume more energy than
all of Iceland’s homes combined.
But wherever there is money, crime
is sure to follow. One night at his key-
board, in the summer of 2017, Stefansson
says he made a connection that would
transform both him and his country. He
won’t say who it was or how they met—
only that it came through a “messenger
somewhere.” The man, a mysterious
and dangerous international inves-
tor who became known as Mr. X, told
Stefansson that his plans were crap.
“Why go to all of the expense and effort
to start your own Bitcoin mine,” Mr. X
asked, “when you can get a head start
into the business by stealing computers
from the competition?”
Mr. X told Stefansson that he would
give him 15 percent of the profits from
as many Bitcoin computers as he could
steal from data centers across Iceland.
The total take, Stefansson calculated,
could be as much as $1.2 million a year—
“forever.” Because, with the stolen
computers, Stefansson and Mr. X would
establish their own Bitcoin mine.
“It’s just amazing that there are com-
puters that make money,” he says. “Regu-
lar people don’t comprehend all it does.
They just don’t get it.” But Stefanssonsaw it for what it was: the perfect crime.
“You’re stealing machines that make
money,” he remembers thinking. “Mak-
ing money while you sleep.”
“It just has to be done,” he told himself.
“I’m ready to go to prison for this. It’s a
once-in-a-lifetime thing.”T
o pull off the heist, Stefansson
says, Mr. X assembled a motley
crew of Icelandic men in their
20s, all of whom happened to know
each other. (“It’s a small island,” Ste-
fansson observes.) They met at a friend’s
house in Reykjavík to go over the plans.
First there was the brawn: Matthias Jon
Karlsson, a quiet, husky guy who worked
in a home for special-needs kids, and
his younger brother, Petur Stanislav,
nicknamed “the Polish.” Next, the beau-
ty: Viktor “the Cutie” Ingi Jonasson, agood-looking guy with a degree as a sys-
tems administrator. None of them had a
significant police record.
Then, according to police, there
were the brains: Stefansson’s childhood
friend and brother-in-crime, Haffi the
Pink, a seasoned drug smuggler with a
long rap sheet, who helped organize the
jobs from where he was living in Thai-
land and Spain.
Finally, there was the boss of the oper-
ation—although who, exactly, that was
remains a matter of dispute. While the
courts have concluded that Stefansson
organized the heist, he insists that he
was directed by the shadowy Mr. X. “You
don’t say no to this guy,” Stefansson says.
“It was not like the old days, when I was
younger and doing it for fun, adrenaline.
It was like an assignment.”
Together, the five men were an Ice-
landic version of the “Ocean’s 11 gang,”
says Alla Ámundadóttir, who covered the
case for the country’s major newspaper,
Frettabladid. “I’ve never seen violence in
them. This is why I can call it my favorite
case. It’s difficult not to root for them.”
By July 2017, Stefansson had a Bitcoin
wallet, burner phones, 10 tracker devices
to attach to security vehicles, and rings
of duct tape to silence any mouthy wit-
nesses. He communicated with his team
via Telegram, a service that enables
encrypted, self-destructing messages.
They also conversed on a Facebook
page called Foruneytid, Icelandic for
“the Fellowship,” a reference to Lord
of the Rings. A prosecutor later insisted
that the page was proof of an organized
crime ring, possibly international in
scope—a claim that cracked the guys
up. “It’s just a Facebook group,” they
told someone they knew, laughing. “It
doesn’t make us Mafia.”
Stefansson began driving nearly six
hours from his home in Akureyri to the
old naval base outside Reykjavík to scout
the premises. There wasn’t much to see.
On the day I visited, several stern guards
sat before giant split-screen security
monitors, watching over every inch of
the facilities, inside and out. But at the
time of the Big Bitcoin Heist, no one was
there. “There was no security,” a guard
tells me. “I shouldn’t say no security,” he
adds hastily. “There was a contract secu-
rity service, but they didn’t walk around.”
On the night of December 5, 2017,
as flurries of sleet and snow buffeted
Iceland, Stefansson and his crew brokeA window was open, to cool
the computers. This being
Iceland, someone had even
left a ladder nearby.
114 VANITY FAIR