A crypto-consultant was hogtied and robbed of watches worth $350,000 during a home invasion in New York City.
Ilya Basin, 37, was cuffed with zip ties by a pair of masked men inside his apartment in the Brighton Beach area of Brooklyn.
The robbery, which was all caught on home security video, saw the raiders get away with a Rolex Presidential watch and an Audemars Piguet timepiece.
“Don’t scream or we’re going to have to choke you out,” one of the suspects can be heard telling the victim as he lay on the floor of his home.
“I’m not going to scream, I promise,” he told the men.
Mr Basin said that the thieves rang his door bell and placed someone else’s package in front of the doorbell camera.
“As I opened it, they both bum-rushed me,” Mr Basin told The New York Post.
“Maybe if I had some karate training, I would have acted differently, but my first instinct was to try to swing the door closed.”
Once inside the apartment they tied his hands and ankles and places tape over his mouth, and threw food out of his fridge to calm down and occupy his pet dog.
“For the first minute or two, I was just hoping that I was going to wake up,” he added.
“I didn’t think it was real. It happened so quick that I didn’t know what was going on. It makes no sense.”
After he was kicked in the face, the robbers grabbed the watches from a bedroom closet, disconnected the Internet router and untied him before leaving.
“I’ve been living in this city since I was six years old,” Mr Basin said.
“This is my home, but this makes me feel like I should definitely get out of here. I don’t have enemies. I’m a sweetheart of a dude. It’s very shocking that this happened.”
And he told the newspaper that all his wealth were tied up in the stolen watches.
“That’s all my money. It’s literally all I have. It was my one hope of getting a house, getting out of here. It was my ‘one ticket’ situation to get a better life.”
A police investigation is underway and not arrests have been made.
