As usual, I don't want anybody maimed or killed or terrorized - unnecessarily.
But don't expect me to come up with whole big bunches of sympathy for the CryptoBros either.
Crypto is rife with fraud and abuse and corruption. Nobody named Trump would be involved if it was anything but crooked.
The digital currency has prompted a rise in physical assaults against those who profit from it
The charming French town of Vierzon should have been an oasis of calm for crypto executive David Balland and his wife.
Instead, it became the scene of 48 hours of terror.
The cryptocurrency executive, who founded Ledger, was kidnapped from his home in the town by a criminal gang demanding a $10m (£7.4m) ransom.
French police launched a desperate manhunt and after more than a day, their special forces unit rescued Balland. About 24 hours later, his wife was saved.
But before he was rescued, the hostage takers had severed one of Mr Balland’s fingers.
The attack on Balland shook the cryptocurrency world. Digital coins such as Bitcoin have made many of the industry’s participants overnight billionaires.
But the hostage crisis has forced many to confront that they are also now potential targets for violent criminals.
The kidnapping of Balland is the most high-profile example of a so-called “wrench attack,” which is becoming a growing threat to crypto executives.
The name derives from an internet cartoon from 2014, which envisions two goons plotting to batter someone with a wrench to get the victim’s computer password.
Billions of dollars in cryptocurrency are stolen every year in cyber attacks, scams and frauds. In 2025, about $3.4bn in digital currency was stolen, according to blockchain experts at Chainalysis.
But in 2026, physical assaults are on the rise.
A report from Certik, a crypto security business, found there had been 34 physical attacks on industry figures in the first three months of 2026, a 41pc increase on 2025.
These attacks resulted in publicly reported thefts of more than $101m in cryptocurrency.
In total, last year, there were 81 publicly recorded attacks that resulted in the loss of $52m in cryptocurrency. These records, based on police reports and public news stories, are thought to significantly underestimate the problem.
Gart, a personal security business, has documented 340 wrench attacks worldwide in the past decade, with the vast majority occurring in the last three years.
In one high-profile incident in New York last March, William Duplessie and John Woeltz, two crypto investors, were arrested after allegedly drugging and applying electric shocks to a man they held hostage in an apartment to force him to give up his Bitcoin password. The case is ongoing.
Gart has also recorded at least 26 fatal crypto-linked attacks.
In December, two Ukrainian men were arrested in Vienna in connection with the death of a man who had been lured to an underground garage.
The victim’s teeth were knocked out and he choked to death on his own blood after surrendering his cryptocurrency encryption keys. His body was found burned in the boot of his own Mercedes.
The UK is also the third-worst country for physical crypto thefts, accounting for 24 in total.
Last week, Hertfordshire police announced that four men had been sentenced for between three and six years for the kidnap and false imprisonment of a 36-year-old man from London. A fifth man was sentenced on money laundering charges.
According to police, the man was followed home by four men after a night out. He awoke beaten and with no memory of the night before, with £10,000 drained from his accounts.
The police were alerted after Coinbase, the digital crypto exchange, noticed unusual activity using the funds.
Unsurprisingly, crypto influencers are uncomfortable discussing the disturbing trend. “It’s advertising me as a risk,” says one entrepreneur.
‘The global epicentre’
While the UK has had its share of attacks, France has an attack every 2.5 days this year.
According to Certik, Europe has a “hyper-concentration” of attacks and France is the “global epicentre”. In February, the French chief executive of Binance had his home invaded in a failed robbery attempt. The thieves left when they discovered he was not home.
French politicians have pledged to crack down on crypto criminals.
According to Certik, France has been worst hit because of a concentration of major businesses and a “culture of flexing” among crypto influencers, who openly flaunt their wealth on social media.
The country has also been badly hit by data breaches that have exposed personal details of crypto holders.
Criminals are not just targeting crypto bros themselves.
In April, a mother and her 11-year-old child in Burgundy were kidnapped as attackers tried to extort the father, a crypto entrepreneur, for $400,000.
Cryptocurrency experts say wrench attacks are not just becoming more common. They are growing in sophistication.
Ari Redbord, head of global policy at blockchain intelligence business TRM Labs, says there has been a “shift from opportunistic targeting to something more structured”.
Prosecutors are now finding organised criminals are arranging the raids, conducting “pre-operational surveillance and the use of encrypted platforms to recruit foot soldiers while insulating organisers from direct exposure”.
Crypto billionaires have claimed that disclosures about their personal wealth can put them at risk of being attacked.
In a lawsuit filed against Bloomberg, Justin Sun, the crypto billionaire behind the digital currency Tron, claimed that the financial website planned to disclose details about his personal holdings, which created a risk of “kidnapping, torture, and other physical violence (‘wrench attacks’), to force the transfer of crypto funds”.
Mr Sun dropped the case in May this year without prejudice.
Security firms have also warned that sophisticated criminals have been attempting to use past data breaches from crypto exchanges to find names, personal details and addresses for potential targets.
In the wake of the Ledger heist, crypto giants have also been ramping up their spending on security for their senior executives.
According to US filings, Coinbase spent $8.7m on security for Brian Armstrong, its chief executive, in 2025, up from $6.2m a year earlier.
Redbord, of TRM, notes that official police and media reports are likely capturing just a small number of the total crypto assaults being carried out around the world.
“Incidents get logged as standard robberies or burglaries – the crypto connection disappears from the record,” he says.
