Three teenagers are being accused of kidnapping a wealthy investor and then stealing $4 million in digital assets after driving him to a desert outside of Las Vegas.

Court records show that Belal Ashraf and Austin Fletcher, both 16, are now facing charges of robbery, kidnapping and extortion, while a third yet-named accomplice remains at large, reports local CBS-affiliate 8 News Now.

A juvenile court judge previously ruled that Ashraf and Fletcher, both from Florida, will face charges as adults. Prosecutors say the third teenager is no longer in the US.

According to court documents, the incident occurred in November and was reported to police by the unnamed victim, who was hosting a cryptocurrency event in downtown Las Vegas.

When he returned to his apartment from the event, the three suspects allegedly approached him after he parked his car and forced him into the back seat of their vehicle, where they held him at gunpoint.

Says court documents,

“[The victim] was told if he complied, he would live to see another day, and if he did not comply, they had his dad and would kill him. [The victim] had a towel placed over his head and was told by the suspects not to look at them.”

The teenagers allegedly demanded that the victim give them his passwords to access his financial accounts, enabling them to allegedly make off with $4 million in cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

The three teenagers are accused of driving the victim about an hour away from Vegas to White Hills, Arizona, where they allegedly left the victim after stealing his crypto.

The man walked five miles across the desert to reach a gas station where he called a friend to pick him up, according to court documents.

Police say they were able to track down the suspects by honing in on a possible suspect’s vehicle traveling from Florida to Nevada, which was also spotted around the victim’s apartment.

Court proceedings against the two teens are ongoing.

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Generated Image: Midjourney

I saw a demo of Gemini Live’s multimodal video streaming and screen sharing support at Google I/O 2024, and admittedly, I was skeptical Project Astra would scale down to smartphones well. Fast-forward about a year later, and Project Astra is in the hands of millions of Google Pixel 9, Samsung Galaxy S25, and Gemini Advanced users. It’s ready, and it’s here — but is it actually useful?

The answer is that it absolutely can be, as long as its use cases are personal to you. For instance, Gemini Live’s multimodal features aren’t going to be a better alternative to Google Search or Circle to Search in most cases. However, in specific circumstances where it’s better to show than tell, Gemini Live’s camera support can come in handy.

After weeks of testing Gemini Live with video streaming, the feature has become an irreplaceable part of one of my non-tech hobbies: gardening. I’ve done it all my life, but after moving from the Garden State to the Arizona desert, I had to relearn everything — new growing seasons, care techniques, problems, and everything in between.

To my surprise, it wasn’t Google or Reddit that helped me navigate this climate most. It was Gemini Live.

Gemini can probably identify plants way better than you can

AI can be fun to play around with, but it’s only truly useful if you know when to use it. Specifically, Gemini Live’s camera features offer the most utility when you have something right in front of you that you’re not sure how to describe. Maybe it’s a piece of furniture in a coffee shop you don’t know the name of, or a monument with a faded plaque. In these situations, typing a written prompt into a chatbot or a search engine won’t do you any good.

That’s where you’d want to turn on your camera in Gemini Live. It’ll help out in many situations, including identifying plants. I picked up a few small potted plants from Ikea and turned to Gemini Live to figure out exactly what they were and how to care for them. Here’s how Gemini responded, based on pointing my camera at the plant:

While this is all happening off-device, Gemini returned the answer pretty fast. Sure enough, it looks like an aloe vera plant. After that, I took the AI assistant up on its offer to enlighten me on care options. Here’s what it said:

The responses were clear and concise, and they ended up saving me a ton of time researching care instructions for a plant I wasn’t even sure the name of a few minutes earlier.

It’ll come up with care options for your plants, too

If Gemini Live were only able to identify plants by looking at them, it would be cool, but it wouldn’t be groundbreaking. The killer feature here is the care instructions that Gemini can provide just by looking at a plant. To test this, I showed it a live camera feed of my basil plant and asked how I should take care of it, and Gemini replied with the following:

I then told Gemini I was planning to keep the basil out on my balcony, and it seemed to like the idea.

The cool thing about going “live” with Gemini is that you can easily provide context or follow-up questions in real time. For example, when the AI suggested I bring it inside when the temperature drops, I could let Gemini know that it won’t be an issue in my climate. It’s easy to get context-specific advice when using your camera with Gemini Live.

When issues arise, Gemini Live can diagnose them

By far, Gemini Live’s most useful capability is diagnosing problems you might run into with your plants. As I mentioned earlier, I’m new to growing plants in the desert, and it’s a learning curve. Since the sun is so intense and the temperature can exceed 120 degrees Fahrenheit, the climate is unforgiving. I was bound to run into issues, and Gemini Live helped me navigate them.

In one case, my hydroponic jalapeño and tomato plants were having a hard time. The jalapeño leaves were browning, and the tomatoes just weren’t turning red. It was Gemini that suggested my apartment’s temperature could be the problem, and sure enough, after turning up the heat for a few days, the tomatoes ripened. It also identified health problems with my plants, as explained in the reply below:

It’s important to remember that while you’re reading the transcript of my conversation with Gemini, this is all being spoken to me in real-time — the same way you’d have a conversation with another person.

I realized Gemini Live’s multimodal features were the real deal when it noticed that I was using an AeroGarden hydroponic system just from the information it could see via my camera feed. After picking up on that information, I received tailored care instructions as follows:

While I might usually dive into gardening books, research studies, or Reddit threads for hours to solve these types of problems, everything you see in this article happened within just a few minutes.

Often, plant growing problems can show the same symptoms, making them hard to diagnose, especially when you’re just getting started. Gemini was vital in helping me overcome them.

My plants are stronger than ever thanks to Gemini Live

If you’ve gotten this far and aren’t as excited by Gemini’s gardening prowess as I am, fear not. This is just one way Gemini Live can help you out in your daily life, and there are many more. I used Gemini to solve problems with my plants, but in the tech world, we simply call that troubleshooting.

You could follow the exact same steps for just about anything else you need to figure out. In Google’s first-ever demo of Project Astra at Google I/O 2024, it used the technology to troubleshoot a finicky record player. These are exactly the kinds of things AI can be great at — it is trained on material that includes user manuals, textbooks, and even online forums. You can tap into the online history of the internet without doing any of the work.

So, before you write off Gemini Live, give its new multimodal camera support a try. When you find your use case for it, it’ll become invaluable.

Dogecoin pricing overview

At the time of this writing, the Doge token is valued at around $0.246, reflecting a decrease of just 0.5 over the past 24 hours. Memecoin appears to have found some horrible support around $0.23, but it hasn’t made enough moves to secure a comeback and wipe out some of the recent losses. Coingecko’s data shows that the largest memecoin in the last seven days has reduced its value by over 25%.

However, price action data shows that Dogecoin’s struggle had not started last week as meme tokens have steadily declined since early December. Data from Santiment shows Doge’s prices have fallen almost 50% after winning a local high two months ago.

While the general market situation was not particularly positive, the memecoin sector appears to be enduring the biggest impacts of climate change. Latest on-chain data suggests that a key class of large investors may play a role in price decline.

Doge’s massive deal witnesses serious decline

In a February 8 post on X Platform, blockchain intelligence company Santiment revealed that Dogecoin whales are declining in market activity and the number of transactions has declined in recent weeks . Specifically, the on-chain analytics company highlighted changes to the two whale transaction groups. It’s a $100,000 and a $1 million transaction.

According to Santiment, the number of Doge deals (valued over $100,000) has increased by more than a third of the volume during the “Trump Pump Rhyme in Early November.” On-chain data shows that $100,000 transactions each week have fallen from 20,200 to 6,200 since November 9, 2024.

Meanwhile, Doge trading, which is $1 million per week, has plummeted more than 75%, moving from 3,490 to 850 in the past three months. As Santiment highlighted, these whale transaction metrics may need to be taken up again if Dogecoin prices recover.

In a new post from X, Crypto analyst Ali Martinez revealed that the whales have accumulated over 100 million Doge tokens in the last 24 hours. Critics say this latest round of accumulation will raise interest and confidence among large investors.