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CASE 369  |  Quentin Cepeljac  |  May 5, 2024  |  UK
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DATABASE RECORD
  id                  369
  date                May 5, 2024
  original_date       May 5, 2024
  year                2024
  month               5
  quarter             2024-Q2
  victim              Quentin Cepeljac
  location            London, England
  country             UK
  scenario            Malicious Invitation - SocialEng
  description         Belgian barber brags about being successful crypto dealer to impress woman. She invites him to her luxury flat, which ends up being a trap. Turned out he only had £6.71 in crypto. Attackers were quickly caught because they had rented an AirBNB for the trap.
  kidnappings         1
  violence_torture    1
  drugs_alcohol       0
  weapons             1
  theft               1
  life_taken          0
  money_wanted        £500,000 in crypto
  coin_type           crypto
  reports             The Times
  notes               he pretended to have a lot of crypto, traveled to meet a woman, and she led him to a bedsit where he was attacked. After torture and threats, they settled for £2,000 from Cepeljac’s bank account.
  has_processed_date  0
  created_at          2025-12-04 19:28:20
  (flag legend: 'kidnappings' is the DETENTION flag — 1 when the victim was held against
   their will at any point, tied, locked in, held at gunpoint or taken away; it is NOT the
   same as the 'Kidnapping' scenario, which means taken away and held. See README, Definitions.)

AI SUMMARY  [revised on review, verified against the sources in this file. Live DB still holds the shorter bulk-import summary — apply this to it.]
  **Victims:** Quentin Cepeljac, a Belgian barber, lured to London.
  
  **Attackers:** A gang (number not recorded) that rented an Airbnb to stage the trap — a mistake that led to their quick arrest.
  
  **Attack Method:** Cepeljac had bragged about being a successful crypto dealer to impress a woman; she invited him to what he took to be her luxury flat, which turned out to be a bedsit set up as a trap.
  
  **Violence Used:** Detention — trapped in the bedsit; he was tortured and threatened.
  
  **Crypto Demanded/Stolen:** The gang expected around £500,000 in crypto, but he in fact held only £6.71; they settled for about £2,000 taken from his bank account.
  
  **Status:** Because the attackers had rented the Airbnb used for the trap, they were quickly identified and caught.

LINKED SOURCES
  [url]  https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/gang-kidnapped-barber-they-mistook-for-crypto-billionaire-n0hgdshvm

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FETCHED ARTICLE 1  [AUTO-TRIMMED — UNREVIEWED]
  !! Furniture was cut by a script keyed on this case's record, not by a person.
  !! It may still carry passages about OTHER cases from a round-up article.
  !! The full page extract is kept in staging/ if a cut needs revisiting.
  Source     thetimes.com
  URL        https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/gang-kidnapped-barber-they-mistook-for-crypto-billionaire-n0hgdshvm
  Field      url
  Retrieved  2026-09-05T13:25:12+00:00 via Wayback Machine snapshot 20250726053648, deterministic extraction (HTTP None)
  Language   unknown
  Kept       paragraphs headline [0] + 1-22 excl [4] of 30
  Length     3,915 chars
  Integrity  sha256 db53eb77d1c66b23ee25c3337088c33a441805936fea79e005b684f6deabe9ac
  Trimmed    AUTO-TRIMMED, unreviewed: kept paragraphs 1-22 plus headline [0]; dropped 0 leading and 7 trailing paragraphs and 1 interior furniture line(s). Case-term hits on page: 43.
  Note       live URL was THIN on the first pass; text comes from an archived copy dated 2025-07-26
  Archive    http://web.archive.org/web/20250726053648/https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/gang-kidnapped-barber-they-mistook-for-crypto-billionaire-n0hgdshvm
  Caveat     retrieved from a Wayback Machine snapshot, not the live page. The
             snapshot date is in the method line; the live URL was unreadable.
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ORIGINAL (unknown, verbatim as retrieved)

Gang kidnapped barber they mistook for crypto billionaire

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Quentin Cepeljac was fooled into travelling from Belgium to London, but was dumped at St Pancras station after thieves found he did not have £500,000

A kidnap gang dumped a celebrity barber at a railway station after mistaking him for a cryptocurrency billionaire.

Quentin Cepeljac, 21, who cuts the hair of several Belgian football stars, was tricked into travelling from Belgium to London by the thieves.

Cepeljac had been befriended on TikTok and Instagram by Davina Raaymakers, 20, who is also Belgian. After he told her that he was a successful cryptocurrency dealer, she invited him to spend a weekend with her at a tenth-floor luxury flat in central London.

Davina Raaymakers befriended Cepeljac on TikTok and invited him to London

Raaymakers had told Cepeljac that she came from a wealthy family with a number of homes abroad, and they met in Brussels before his visit to London.

When Cepeljac arrived in London to meet Raaymakers on May 5 last year, she told him that the luxury flat was unavailable and they would stay at one of her parents’ Airbnb apartments. She led him to a bedsit in Shepherd’s Bush where he was attacked.

Cepeljac’s kidnappers held a machete to his neck and a knife to his leg, and punched and kicked him in the stomach. At this point, Raaymakers left the flat. During the nine-hour ordeal, the gang also showed Cepeljac a video of an apparent stabbing to convince him they were capable of lethal violence.

The gang, who included Raaymaker’s boyfriend Adlan Haji, were under the impression that Cepeljac was a cryptocurrency billionaire. After taking his passport, phone and embossed Louis Vuitton wallet, they demanded he transfer them £500,000 from his crypto account.

Adlan Haji, Raaymaker’s boyfriend, was part of the plot

Cepeljac replied: “I don’t have that kind of money”. Haji, 28, said: “Are you kidding me?”

The kidnappers reduced their demand to £50,000, before settling for £2,000 from Cepeljac’s current account after learning that he only held £6.71 in crypto. They forced him to call a friend in Belgium to ask for more money. The friend called Belgian police, who contacted Scotland Yard.

Cepeljac’s kidnappers eventually accepted that he was of no use to them and took him in a taxi to St Pancras station the following morning so he could take a Eurostar train home to Brussels. Before leaving him, they returned his passport and phone.

The Metropolitan Police’s Flying Squad was waiting for Cepeljac at the station. He led officers back to the flat in Shepherd’s Bush, which had been forensically cleaned with bleach. They established that the flat was an Airbnb rental and used phone data to track down the kidnappers who had booked it.

Isleworth crown court heard that Raaymakers and Haji were joined in the plot by Alexander Khalil, 30, and Omar Sharif, 24. During Cepeljac’s abduction, Sharif had to leave the flat because he was electronically tagged and was required to be home by 8pm.

Cepeljac said that he suffered from flashbacks, had difficulty sleeping and leaving his home, and found it difficult to trust other people, especially women.

The defendants, who are all unemployed and from around London, admitted blackmail and will be sentenced later. Recorder Nicola Shannon said they would face long jail terms.

Our Claire was murdered by a stranger. Why does no one seem to care?

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generated from attacks-export-Gart-website.json + reported_K&R  |  case 369
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