kidnapping torture and mutilation these are some
of the misfortunes that can befall you or your family if criminals suspect that you’ve made money
in crypto and I’m not being alarmist for the sake of it violent crime targeting crypto holders
is on the rise around the world with Western Europe emerging as a major flash point today we
investigate the latest crime wave terrorizing our industry to find out what’s going on and
just how worried we should be my name is Nick and you’re watching the Coin Bureau for as long
as there have been blockchain wallets secured by bulletproof cryptography thieves have been
exploiting a loophole the flesh and bone of their much less bulletproof owners when cyber security
isn’t easily compromised violence becomes the path of least resistance for crypto thieves no coding
knowledge is needed all you need is a human target a violent predisposition a weapon and ideally some
likeminded villains to collaborate with can’t hack a crypto wallet no problem threaten its owner
with some heavy object and you’re in at least that’s the classic wrench attack so for example
if you flaunt your crypto gains on social media local bad guys might start taking notes and mug
you on site sad but we know it’s all possible but recently wrench attacks of a more sophisticated
nature have been making headlines around the world organized crime groups have stepped in and their
methods are much more sinister than your average alleyway stickup kidnapping mutilation and ransom
have become common features of the latest wave of violent crime targeting victims thought to own
a large amount of crypto cases following this pattern have been reported in the UK Belgium
Spain Ukraine South Africa Costa Rica Russia Turkey Thailand Canada and the US however it’s
France that is leading the world in high-profile crypto kidnapping cases this year now I’ll caveat
this by saying that the cases that make it onto the news are likely the tip of the iceberg for
every incident reported there are likely several others that go unreported for various reasons for
example victims may be traumatized and fear being targeted again if their ordeal is made public
and repeat attacks on the same person have been recorded in the UK so this is a very real and
rational fear by the way alternatively any case involving ransom that doesn’t end in a victory
for law enforcement is a terrible precedent for the state which will have a motive to prevent
the news from reporting on it or in parts of the world where violent crime is common individual
crypto kidnappings may face stiff competition to make it onto the news especially if the victim
does not have a public profile but that’s only speculation so for now let’s stick to what we
know and that is that crypto holders in France are being terrorized by a wave of kidnappings this
year with many cases sharing striking similarities the first such case in France this year began on
New Year’s Eve when two criminals burst into the family home of a Dubai based crypto influencer
in Sanjenei Pui they tied up his mother and his sister kidnapping his father and contacted the
influencer himself demanding a ransom payment the influencer immediately contacted the police
who were able to free his sister and his mother the following night French police stopped a
car at a service station in Lemon some 500 km from where the kidnapping took place two hooded
suspects fled the vehicle leaving the cops to hear someone crying for help from inside the trunk
inside they discovered the 56-year-old father tied up severely beaten disorientated and dowsted
with gasoline we couldn’t find any report of the perpetrators being apprehended so they may still
be at large around the same time police in Djon foiled an alleged plot to kidnap a tax adviser
and his wife who were reportedly targeted for their crypto holdings the couple noticed a pair
of apparently stolen vehicles with false license plates casing their house and following their
cars for days on end luckily the police put an end to the alleged plot having been alerted by the
couple in December after a GPS tracker was found in front of their house a third incident followed
on January 21st when David Baland one of the eight co-founders of Ledger was abducted with his wife
from their home in Maro which is in central France the kidnappers took their hostages to two separate
addresses cut off one of Balain’s fingers and sent a video of the seed appendage to another of
Ledger’s co-founders which was Eric Lashave along with a demand for €10 million paid in
crypto €3 million of the ransom was paid but almost all of it was frozen and seized after a
successful rescue operation this involved almost a 100 police officers who freed Balain from a
property several miles away the following day the attackers did make some effort to launder
the ransom that they had received using a large number of transactions and cross-chain bridging
however they made a rookie mistake by trying to launder most of the funds into Tether’s
USDT leading to Tether freezing all but $150,000 of the ransom balain’s wife was found the
next day tied up in the trunk of a car in his saun 12 mi south of Paris police arrested 10 suspects
including the suspected ring leader a 26-year-old with a police record for previous kidnappings at
least six have been charged by French prosecutors and if convicted they face up to life in prison
as you may have noticed the Baland kidnapping coincided with a major local top for the price
of BTC which reached a new all-time high past $19,000 just hours before the crime predictably
organized crypto ransom crimes tend to take place when the markets are running at their hottest it
was no coincidence then that a second kidnapping attempt happened in France later that same
week on January 25th a crypto miner in the northeastern town of Tuah was lured into what
he thought was a business meeting with four individuals who kidnapped him and held him hostage
at a suburban property the perpetrators in this case were thankfully less ambitious keeping the
30-year-old victim in good health and demanding a more modest €20,000 for his release luckily
he managed to contact a friend who called the police leading to his rescue and the arrest
of the four suspects at the scene that evening April saw crypto prices take a deep nose dive and
as prices slipped so too did the number of crypto kidnappings making the headlines we can actually
see this from a log of wrench attacks reported in English language news media maintained by Jamson
Lop a co-founder and chief security officer of Bitcoin security provider Casa lop has recorded
232 incidents since 2014 including 43 cases involving hostage taking and ransom demands
as I mentioned earlier any list based on news articles is definitely not going to give us the
full picture but nonetheless it’s interesting to see how LOP’s entries multiply during bull
markets and dry up when prices are falling for example LOP recorded 21 wrench attacks during the
3-month bull market from November through January and just 11 during the 3-month market correction
from February through April bitcoin exploded back into action in late April and has since reclaimed
100K so you know what that means violent crime is picking up again lo and behold the first two weeks
of May saw three new entries into the log two of which were kidnappings in Paris one case saw a
50-year-old man abducted in broad daylight while walking his dog in Paris on the morning of April
29th the victim who co-owned a crypto marketing firm with his son was thrown into the back of a
van by four men wearing ski masks in what looks like a horrific mashup of the earlier episodes in
France the captives took him to a property in a saun where they tied him up and cut off one of his
fingers the victim’s son was then sent a gruesome video evidence along with a demand for ransom of
5 to7 million in exchange for his father’s release what was peculiar about this case however was that
the perpetrators demanded the sum be paid in fiat currency via wire transfer not by crypto no doubt
they were aware of the crypto ransom in the Balan case had been traced frozen and seized by law
enforcement and didn’t want to make the same mistake the only problem is that it’s just as easy
if not easier for law enforcement to trace freeze and seize wire transfers one has to wonder if not
for a launderable crypto ransom payment then why was this wealthy crypto entrepreneurs’s
father singled out for a kidnapping maybe the victim and his son had flaunted their
wealth on social media drawing the attention of criminals and maybe those criminals found their
public crypto wallet addresses and deemed them sufficiently high value targets based on that
information for now we can only speculate on May 3rd the victim was freed from the trunk of a
car in Normandy having been tortured and dowsted with gasoline the kidnappers were allegedly
preparing to pierce one of his knees with a drill thankfully a police raid thwarted the operation
and resulted in five arrests all suspects are reportedly in their 20s and could face charges
of kidnapping quote with torture or a barbaric act according to an AP report the second case in
Paris this May went viral on social media after a bloody struggle on the street was caught on video
by multiple witnesses in a familiar setup three hooded and masked criminals ambushed a family
of three with a fake gun and tear gas in broad daylight as they were walking through Paris’s 11th
Orandism among the victims were the 34year-old daughter and 2-year-old grandson of the CEO and
founder of a European crypto exchange Pame the attackers attempted to drag the woman into the
back of a white delivery van but were met with resistance as she and her bloodied husband who
suffered a fractured skull clung to each other on the ground shouting for help the abduction attempt
was aborted after an intervention by a nearby bike shop owner brandishing a fire extinguisher and
he of course chased these criminals and they sped away in a waiting van at the time of making this
video the perpetrators are unfortunately still at large this spate of attacks in France has put the
local crypto industry on edge and fire under the feet of the authorities in particular Interior
Minister Bruno Rotalier has been forced to act recently meeting with industry leaders and the
director general of the national police to discuss measures to quote prevent deter and protect after
the meeting Retalu expressed his determination to quote “put an end to these unbearable attacks
targeting crypto asset professionals and announced new security measures for crypto professionals
including priority access to emergency services and home security assessments by the police
among others also discussed was police training to prevent crypto money laundering which is
interesting because recent cases in France have shown the criminals laundering skills to be
very poor at best.” In a recent blog post Chain Analysis observed that the crypto ransom and
laundering side of the recent kidnapping cases were remarkably unsophisticated contrasting with
the high stakes kidnapping and torture operations a common theme in the reporting on the kidnappings
in France is the idea that criminals are fools who do not understand that crypto is a poor choice
for money laundering since it exists on a public ledger and in many cases can be frozen and seized
remotely at the request of law enforcement if this is true it is quite surprising it recalls the
kinds of arguments we had back in the Silk Road era when skeptics erroneously portrayed crypto
as a money launderer’s best friend since then the entire crypto industry has spent years trying to
reassure the world that blockchains are very bad money laundering channels and now that we are in
the stage of institutional and nation state crypto adoption the idea that organized crime groups
do not understand this stretches the imagination it’s hard to believe that criminals could be
so readily prepared to mutilate and torture without having a sound plan to make off with the
ransom but this is what we saw in France this year especially in the Balain case as far as we know
none of the kidnapping plots in France this year have ended in the successful laundering of the
crypto ransom and following the Baland affair we even saw a crypto kidnapping where the suspects
demanded a ransom via a bank transfer a choice so poor that it’s almost suspicious we can only hope
that the repeated failure of kidnapping plots in France will dissuade future attempts but uh so far
the criminals are showing no signs of giving up in France or anywhere else for that matter based on
Jamson Lop’s incident log 2025 looks set to be a record year for wrench attacks around the world
there were 21 entries in 2023 and 28 in 2024 but the first 4 and a half months of 2025 already has
18 entries and counting as of midmay and needless to say France is doing much of the heavy lifting
in this regard so um what’s up with that anyway well some reports have suggested that French
organized crime groups are copying methods they’ve observed elsewhere abroad the Spanish newspaper Al
Paete drew a comparison between the recent events in France and the 2023 murder of Fernando Perez
Algaba a millionaire crypto influencer whose arms and legs were discovered in a suitcase by a group
of children on the outskirts of Buanaseras in the summer of 2023 similarly the report references a
kidnapping that took place in Ukraine last summer when four asalants abducted a 29year-old man stole
two or three of his Bitcoin and then murdered him alpa also highlights the attempted kidnapping of
a crypto forum moderator in Quebec last January by attackers who planned to torture him and steal
his BTC but while all these are grizzly wrench attacks involving kidnapping we’re not convinced
that they inspired the serial cases in France which have some important distinguishing features
and are clearly a program by organized criminals for example the indirect targeting of the wealthy
crypto holders via the kidnapping of their family members and the ring leaders recruitment and
remote instruction of young criminals who they have never met via telegram and signal so
we think that France’s predicament is best understood in the local context organized crime in
the country has become emboldened in recent years defying the state attacking prisons and leaving
a trail of extremely gruesome and cruel murders in its wake that make the crypto kidnappings
look mild by comparison and this is useful to know but does it mean that the rest of us are
safe of course not of course not you need only look at Jamison Lob’s GitHub page to know that
violence against crypto holders is now a global phenomenon and if you are holding crypto or know
someone who does this is a risk you can’t afford to ignore it should be obvious but remember you
have nothing to lose and everything to gain by keeping the state of your finances to yourself
the bad news is that even if you don’t tell a soul that you own crypto you still might be
targeted and that’s if you’ve ever completed a KYC process to use a crypto exchange or some
other crypto service most of us have done this exposing sensitive personal information with
private companies who may not be able to keep it safe case in point the Coinbase leak just
recently criminals managed to bribe Coinbase customer service workers at a call center in
India to gain access to the exchanges customer database according to Bloomberg this low tech
method enabled the attackers to obtain names date of birth addresses nationalities government
ID numbers some banking data and creation dates and most crucially balance details of Coinbase
accounts for as many as 97,000 users once upon a time this kind of thing couldn’t happen in
crypto because exchanges didn’t collect this much information about their users in the first
place of course the global KYC regime changed all of that forcing crypto users to dox themselves on
every exchange in a bit to prevent crypto crime it’s a little ironic that the resulting customer
databases now maintained by crypto exchanges are so easily accessible by criminals who can buy and
sell information for identifying and locating new victims pmium the company targeted in the recent
botch kidnapping attempt on the CEO’s family made a similar point criticizing the notorious travel
rule that requires data to be collected about the source and recipient of crypto transfers we
wonder how many people will become victims of violent crime as a result of the Coinbase breach
and how many crypto holders have to become victims before privacy and anonymity start to look like a
greater good than KYC and AML food for thought for the time being it looks like kidnapping is in
fashion so please be careful and keep as low a profile as possible when you are doing anything
to do with crypto for practical advice to check out our video rundown of the top dos and don’ts
for keeping yourself and your crypto secure that’s right over here and if you’re not subscribed
to the channel yet you can do that right over here that’s me for now thank you very much for
watching keep safe and secure see you guys soon
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