THE FUGITIVES
The Sogn prison, where Stefansson escaped. He was captured after he and his accomplices posted a photo on Instagram (left).LARGE PHOTOGRAPH BY ANDREW TESTA/THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX.
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 center?” the caller demanded.
“Yes,” Gylfason replied. The caller abruptly 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 presented 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 wearing 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 suddenly 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, Karlsson 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 follows the Rolling Stones to concerts around the 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, Kjartansson 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 wiretaps, 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 cryptocurrency industry at stake, police dispensed with the “conversation room.” Gone were the cozy couch and the comfy blanket. Stefansson was thrown in solitary for a month and grilled repeatedly by police, who pressured him to reveal the location of the stolen computers. “They were rough!” Stefansson says. “They were punishing me for not giving up the computers.”
Officers from every police district in Iceland 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 Bitcoin mine owned by a Russian couple they suspected of being the thieves. And they descended on buildings where electricity usage spiked to Bitcoin levels. Unfortunately, such power surges are also common in Iceland’s other prevalent industry: pot farming. “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.
The case might have ended there, an obscure series of crimes in a cold and remote country. But Stefansson’s next step made headlines worldwide: He used a loophole in the law to escape from prison.
In Iceland, it is not a crime to stage a prison break: The law recognizes that inmates, like all human beings, are naturally entitled to freedom, and thus cannot be punished for seeking it. After his arrest, Stefansson was held for three months as a “resident” in an “open” prison in Sogn, where inmates are housed in private rooms with flat-screen TVs and cell phone privileges. On April 16, 2018, a hearing was held to consider a request by prosecutors to extend Stefansson’s detention for another 10 days prior to trial. “The judge made the decision to think the matter over” until the following morning, Stefansson later observed. But “the judge did not extend the custody temporarily.”
The prison staff advised Stefansson that, technically, he was a free man: The order had expired at 4 p.m. and would not be extended until the next day. He signed a declaration saying he “would spend the night in a prison cell while I waited for the judge to rule on the extension of my custody.” Then he climbed out of the window in his room, hitchhiked 65 miles to the airport, and took a flight to Stockholm in the name of “an old friend.” Since Sweden does not require Icelandic travelers to have passports, Stefansson says he “didn’t have to show any IDs, talk to any staff, nothing.”
By chance, Stefansson was on the same flight as Katrin Jakobsdottir, the prime minister of Iceland, who was sitting a few rows in front of him. (“We did not chat,” Stefansson later said. “I kept my head down as much as I could.”) By the time the alarm was sounded back at the prison, Stefansson was approaching Sweden.
The police, assisted by Interpol, mobilized in an international manhunt. But Stefansson managed to stay one step ahead. From Sweden, he traveled to Denmark, then to Germany by train, and finally to Amsterdam by car. While on the lam he wrote a letter that was published in Frettabladid, detailing what he claimed were human rights violations by the police. (His attorney refers to his interrogation as “torture.”) Residents of Iceland began cheering the Bitcoin bandits, who were well on their way to becoming folk heroes. “I am proud of him for standing up for his rights and protesting that he was illegally held in jail,” says Stefansson’s accomplice, Viktor “the Cutie” Jonasson.
Then, once again, Stefansson screwed up. In Amsterdam, he met up with Viktor the Cutie and Haffi the Pink. The trio brazenly posed for a picture in front of the De Bijenkorf department store wearing triumphant smiles and sunglasses. Haffi posted the image on Instagram and tagged it #teamsindri.
Two hours later, Stefansson was arrested by the Amsterdam police. He spent the next 19 days in a Dutch prison before being extradited to Iceland to stand trial.
On December 5, 2018, to protect their privacy, the suspects entered the courtroom the same way they had entered the Bitcoin mines, their faces covered—in Haffi’s case, by a Louis Vuitton scarf. Only Stefansson chose to show his face to the cameras. After confessing to two of the burglaries, he received the stiffest sentence: four and a half years in prison. Matthias Karlsson confessed to the Advania heist and was sentenced to two and a half years; his brother, Petur the Polish, received 18 months. Haffi the Pink, Viktor the Cutie, and the security guard, Ivar Gylfason, got sentences ranging from 15 to 20 months. The burglars also had to repay the police $116,332 for the legal costs of the investigation. Everyone except Gylfason is appealing their convictions, and all remain free until their appeals are resolved.
And the mysterious Mr. X that Stefansson continues to blame for the crimes? “Many Icelanders believe in elves and trolls,” says Kjartansson, the police chief. “I am not one of them.”
If Mr. X does exist, he remains at large, as do the 550 stolen Bitcoin computers. It’s possible that the machines are blinking away in a warehouse somewhere at this very moment, mining Bitcoin for the young men who stole them. According to prosecutors, Stefansson had leased a former fish-processing factory in northern Iceland. Was it to house the stolen computers and launch his Bitcoin mine?
“Maybe the computers have been running the whole time,” Stefansson tells me. “Maybe I know where they are. Maybe I do, and maybe I don’t.”
“If you were Mr. X,” I ask him, “how would you grade the Big Bitcoin Heist?”
“A masterpiece,” he says. Then he catches himself. “I just wish I had done it.”