- A Swedish man, Jermu Salonen, has been sentenced to six and a half years for sending a letter bomb to CryptoPay’s Hackney office
- He had emailed the firm in 2017 to have his password reset but was denied
- He had previously sent suspicious packages to members of the Swedish parliament
CryptoPay, a London-based Bitcoin firm received quite a scare this past week at a letter bomb was sent to their office.
The sender of the bomb is reportedly a Swedish man who was angry with the company for not resting his password.
Back in August 2017, the man had sent an email to CryptoPay asking that his password be reset. However, this would have violated company policy and thus, his request was denied.
This would have been the end of the matter but Jermu Michael Salonen, 43, decided instead to attempt an act of terrorism.
He has since been sentenced to six-and-a-half years in prison at Stockholm District Court.
Known to police
This is not the first time Salonen has attempted such an act. In 2017, he sent a parcel containing a suspicious white powder to a number of lawmakers in Sweden including the Prime Minister.
The package he intended for CryptoPay was delivered to an office Hackney which was the location of an accounting firm patronized by CryptoPay.
In March 2018, an employee of the firm began opening the package, which contained the two devices, but stopped after he became suspicious and contacted the authorities.
Salonen’s efforts were misguided as the address he sent the bomb to didn’t even have any CryptoPay employees working there.
“We are relieved that no one from The Accountancy Cloud team was hurt in this incident,” a spokesman for Cryptopay told the BBC. “None of our employees have ever worked at that address.”
The spokesman also said that this incident would lead to better security practices for CryptoPay employees.
“The vast majority of our employees work remotely across Europe, but we are implementing additional security measures to prevent any potential harm to our employees anyway.
Caught through DNA evidence
The employees at the Hackney office were incredibly lucky that the employee who was opening the package opened it from the middle rather than through the flap as doing the latter would have activated the bomb.
After the authorities were alerted, the package was scanned but did not match UK databases so Interpol was called.
“Through these inquiries, it was identified that the DNA matched those of Salonen, who was known to Swedish authorities,” the Met says.
When Salonen’s home was searched, bomb components were found.
