A son has been arrested and sentenced in a crypto crime that almost left his father dead. The son who had wanted to get his hands on his father’s crypto holdings but could not do so without getting access to his phone had turned to drugging his father and taking the phone off him. The series of events that follow is a rollercoaster that saw the father recovering in the hospital for four days and the son being arrested and charged.
Drug Addict Son Spikes Father’s Tea
The son identified as Liam Ghershony had started investing in the crypto market with his father after he introduced the latter to the market. The father told Washington Post that he had put his son as a partner on an investment account with $100,000 in it. Together, the pair had invested in cryptocurrencies that had yielded a healthy profit for both of them.
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With the investment account now worth a lot more, both father and son were able to cash out some of their holdings and were left with an after-tax profit of $350,000. Problems had begun to arise when Liam had grown more paranoid with the declining market prices after the 2017/2018 bull market had begun to slow down. This paranoia was exacerbated by Liam’s use of benzodiazepines which he had grown addicted to.
Liam had approached his father about cashing out the rest of the portfolio, telling the older Ghershony that he needed to sell. The father recalls telling his son that he needed to stop doing drugs instead.
Determined to take matters into his own hands, Liam had cooked up a plan to sell the bitcoin holdings. After spending the day with his father helping to move furniture into a loft apartment, the pair had had dinner and then settled down for the night. This is when Liam took the opportunity to present his father with tea spiked with “Benzos”, assuring him that the tea would give him energy.
Ghershony recalls drinking the tea but does not remember anything after that.
Subsequent Charges For Crypto Crime
Liam had been able to successfully retrieve his father’s phone and access the account, moving two-thirds of the portfolio into another cryptocurrency, ethereum. He had then left his father in the apartment believing that he would wake up later on his own. This would not be the case as the father would lay in the apartment for two days before being found.
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After being taken to the hospital, it was discovered that he had been drugged with a high dose of benzodiazepines which left him severely dehydrated with acute organ dysfunction. The older Ghershony had then spent four days in the hospital recovering.
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Liam Ghershony was charged initially with attempted murder but was reduced to a lesser charge on account of his intentions not being to murder the father. He later pled guilty to the charge of felony assault and was given 125 days in jail, as well as the condition of going through two months of residential drug and mental health treatment.
Liam now lives in a group house with other addicts in recovery and is waiting tables at a restaurant in Rockville.
Featured image from Depositphotos, chart from TradingView.com