Brandon Smietana, the creator of the Skycoin cryptocurrency, filed a civil racketeering lawsuit on February 9 against a slew of people. He claims that the people hired to market the coin and redo its website ended up damaging the website to demand ransom payments, and ultimately kidnapped Smietana and his girlfriend, then beat and tortured them for hours until Smietana handed over $360,000 in Bitcoin and Skycoin.One defendant in the lawsuit has described the suit as “absurd” and “pretty weird”, and said that Smietana has “a history of blaming other people for the failure of Skycoin”.