[flooow]

It's obviously going to be much much more difficult to steal $450K from an actual bank account and get clean away - you're going to need a lot more proof of identity than a google login. From that POV, owning a lot of cryptocurrency is painting a target on your back.

[nytesky]

How do they identify their marks? A random firefighter seems like an odd target.

[PleasureBot]

Could just be people talking about crypto on social media directly saying that they own some. Would not be too hard to find accounts where you can clearly identify the person behind the twitter handle, facebook profile, instragram account or whatever talking about that online. We're only hearing about people who happened to lose a huge amount of money but lots of people probably fell for this scam and lost money on the scale of $100 or $1000.

[derangedHorse]

I found this video, titled 'To Catch a Scammer: How a real-life criminal steals your bitcoin' pretty informative. An employee is able to go into detail on how scammers find their marks: https://youtu.be/pskUt4ZjM4M

The video linked in the article by Junseth also goes over some of this.