It's hard for anyone to snatch your real estate with a gun, but if you own a string of cryptocurrencies that are transferable at any time and cashable globally, it's a perfect walking ATM for criminals.

According to incomplete statistics on public cases by BlockBeats, about 7 "physical" encrypted kidnappings, home robberies or violent threats occurred in 2022; by 2023, this number has at least doubled to about 15–18; in 2024, it continued to grow, with at least 20 cases, and the average amount of single cases involved is higher, with ransoms or losses in several cases often exceeding one million US dollars; in the first half of 2025 (as of June), there have been at least 34 cases, far exceeding last year, setting a record high. Most cases are typical "wrench attacks". Even if the victims have the safest cold wallet and cryptocurrency defense, they will not be able to stop a knife, wrench or electric shock rod.

The word wrench attack comes from a famous XKCD comic: When complex cryptographic protection is in the face of physical violence, you only need a wrench to make you hand over your private keys

The typical methods of these wrench attacks include: breaking directly into the room, threatening with armed forces or binding torture, forcing mnemonic words or transfers; disguising police, agents, insurance officers, Uber Drivers, etc., first trick people into confined spaces and then start; use acquaintances or lures to ambush them, and make an appointment to hotels, apartments, and cars to commit crimes; organized gangs roam across countries, such as South Asian gangs in Southeast Asia, Russian gangs in Thailand, and Uganda to pretend to be military and police.

The Bali Massacre: A Deadly Fault in a Vacation Paradise

When it comes to cryptocurrency-related kidnappings, most people's first impression is the Bali couple's tragedy, a case that has caused quite a shock in the currency circle and the tourism circle.

The time is May 1, 2023, in a five-star hotel in Bali, Indonesia. A couple who were only 22 years old who came to travel was found dead by accident and died in a tragic situation.

According to the testimony of 31 witnesses and forensic examinations at that time, the official conclusion was simpler and straightforward: the man strangled his girlfriend to death first, and then stabbed himself in a beer bottle to pieces., and then break it up. The police said that the two had quarreled over some private conflicts before in Bali, and the man was injured on his left hand, so from the police's perspective, this is a typical "murder suicide".

But there is a detail here that made the case explode in the currency circle for a time - there are rumors that the deceased was a person in the currency circle, and the man may have a cryptocurrency worth about 200 million yuan.

Before the official determination that the case was "murder suicide", most people in the currency circle speculated that someone fell in love with the money and wanted to hand over the wallet key, so the suspect lynched the two people and wanted to get the password, but the person was gone and the money was not known whereabouts.

But at the same time, many details of the case were dug out on the Internet, such as why did the two people check in at the staggered location? The girl’s name was registered in the hotel room? The first thing the man did when he went to the hotel room was to check the next door and the corridor repeatedly, because he was afraid that someone would sneak in from the secret passage or outside the window? There is no fingerprint found on the beer bottle, like a professional killer who cleanly works and wipes it off. Another thing is that the boy had a small braid tied in the leaked photo, which looked a little "jianghu". People in the circle say that this temperament and dress are very common in some gangsters in Southeast Asia or Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Many details have added a widely circulated version of the case: In Southeast Asia, this "spinach" base and telecommunication park, they all like to use USDT or various cryptocurrencies to transfer money to "whitewash". This boy with huge sums of money took away the money from his "owner" under the name of "whitewashing". Several local Indonesian OTC merchants sold his whereabouts when they helped him exchange USDT for US dollars. The "owner" who found that the money was lost offered a huge reward to "kill the chicken to warn the monkey". The professional killer followed the clues and found the hotel and started the attack. The way of attack was completely in line with the operations of the gangsters when they were revenge. Because the "join" is not a small person, there may be some warlords and corrupt officials in Southeast Asia behind it. At the same time, they are worried that amplifying this case will scare away a large number of foreign tourists, so the local area would rather suppress it.

Of course, this is just a version of speculation and not necessarily the truth of the case. However, because of the mysterious color and tragic nature of the case itself, it has always been very famous in the currency circle. RIP…

According to local Indonesians, this case has caused little splash in the local area.Everything is in good condition and business is still booming now. To this day, it is still considered a luxury resort. The sea breeze in Bali has blew too much news about kidnapping related to encryption, and it is cold and has nothing to do with the sunshine of the resort.

For example, in early 2023, a news broke out in the crypto circle: A crypto blogger named Yuri Boytsov was targeted. At that time, he rented a sea view villa in Bali. During the day, he taught people to trade coins on Telegram and drink beer in the sea breeze at night. One night, four people suddenly rushed into his house. One night, one of them was wearing police uniforms, and the other two were white faces, covered with heads, without talking nonsense. He first pressed the person on the ground, snatched his phone and passport, and then forced him to unlock his wallet, and transferred away $284,000 worth of Bitcoin. Later, the Indonesian police only caught one suspect, and the suspect bit him back, saying that Yuri was a liar and deserved to be robbed. In the end, the money was not recovered and there was no explanation for the person. Yuri moved to something else in a mess.

There is an older one, which happened at the end of 2021. An Italian couple living in a villa in Seminyak District was broken into the door at 3 a.m. The criminal was all dressed in black, wearing gloves and head hoods. He first tied up the male owner, pressed his knife against his neck, sealed his mouth with tape, and then asked for the password of his phone. If you don’t cooperate, you will try to fight and threaten in a different way. In the end, all the Bitcoin account and six mobile phones were looted, which was about $374,000. Afterwards, the police found that two of the foreign men who committed the crime had had meals and partying at the victim's house. At present, the police have only arrested two of them, and the remaining Polish and Russians are still wanted.

Son debt and father repayment: kidnapping and theft case

On August 25, 2024, an irritating Sunday afternoon, a high-end community in Danbury, Connecticut, USA, had neatly decorated lawns and freshly cleaned outdoor lounge chairs next to the swimming pool. Most of the people living here are safe and wealthy, and the chances of kidnapping are not common, and a policeman may meet each other in his life.

Sushil is the vice president of Morgan Stanley. Although his annual salary is high, he is not as rich as a shocking level. That day, Sushil and his wife were driving a newly bought Lamborghini and looking at houses in the community. But this middle-class family did not expect a nightmare to have a terrifying nightmare in the next few minutes.

As soon as the car turned an intersection, a white Honda suddenly hit Sushil's Lamborghini's tail from behind. Sushil subconsciously stepped on the brakes.Just as I was about to get off the car and see what happened, a large white truck rushed out towards me, blocking Lamborghini. Within seconds, six men in black wearing masks rushed out of the front and rear cars. There was almost no time for people to react, the car door was pulled open and the couple was pulled out, Sushil shouted and resisted desperately, but in the end there was a baseball bat, which hit his head hard, and half of his face was covered in blood.

The couple were dragged to the trunk by them and tied them tightly with tape, wrapping them like a mummy. They wrapped their mouths twice, and their hands and feet could not move, so they could only breathe against the gap in the nostrils. The truck turned around and stepped on the accelerator and ran away, just like it was in the movie. It’s just that the movie is played, the couple’s fear and suffocation are real, the tin car is violently shaking, and the kidnappers knock on them from time to time with baseball bats, and every stroke is so painful.

But what the kidnappers did not expect was that an off-duty FBI agent happened to witness everything nearby, and he immediately followed the truck to report the license plate number to the local police. Within ten minutes, the patrol car caught up with the truck. Seeing that something was wrong, the driver started running wildly, going against the wind, rushing to the red light, and making sparks everywhere on the curb. After chasing for about a mile, the car finally lost control and hit the roadside guardrail. The four kidnappers jumped directly into the vehicle and fled under the bridge and into the woods, but were eventually held down by the police.

The rescued couple was covered in wounds, with tape on their legs and blood on their faces. Strangely, law enforcement discovered that the suspects, aged 18 to 26, drove from Miami to Connecticut for renting a car. The journey from Miami to Connecticut is about 2100 kilometers, and it takes 20 hours to go straight without stopping. What exactly is this couple worth a bunch of people flying from Florida to Connecticut? Sushil is just an executive of an investment bank. Although his salary is high, he really needs to make money and just grab the car. Why is he kidnapped by a big fight?

The truth was slowly made afterwards. Police flipped through the phones of several suspects and watched them chatting in the group, and found that the real target of the group was not the couple at all, but their son, Veer Chetal, an 18-year-old high school graduate, and even led to a $250 million cryptocurrency theft.

Chetal's identity is not simple. He studied at Rutgers University in New Jersey during the day, but at night he is a thief in the currency circle.

Last August, Chetal and several friends who met on the Minecraft game black market formed a "net black group". Using an old but tried-and-tested social engineering routine, impersonating Google and the crypto trading platform Gemini customer service, transferred 4,100 bitcoins from an early bitcoin player in Washington in batches, and calculated at the market price at that time was worth $250 million, while the time of writing was worth $420 million.

After getting the money, Chetal and his group lived a splurge on their lives: spending millions of dollars on cars, jewelry, renting luxury homes and attending nightclub parties. I drove a Lamborghini to school, went to nightclubs every few days, changed luxury cars and party after party.

It was at a Miami nightclub that the young and energetic Chetal had a dispute with one of the kidnappers, and it eventually turned into a physical conflict. The kidnappers learned that Chetal had a large amount of cryptocurrency, so they flew from Florida to Connecticut, planning to take his parents as hostage first, and then force Chetal to spit out the remaining money - the afternoon when Lamborghini was rear-ended that day.

There are at least dozens of similar small and medium-sized frauds behind Chetal, with the small scale of tens of thousands of dollars and the large scale of two or three million dollars. Police searched his home for $500,000 in luxury jewelry cash and $39 million in cryptocurrency.

Chetal has pleaded guilty and promised to testify in exchange for a commutation of sentence, and may face a sentence of about 20 years, according to court documents released this week. Born in India, Chetal, came to the United States with his family at the age of four in 2010 and obtained a related dependent visa for his father’s foreign workers’ visa, but he may have been deported for the criminal case. Chetal's father also lost his job in Morgan Stanley because of this.

The Lamborghini, which once showed off her identity, is now parked alone in the parking lot of the police station in Connecticut.

Hal Finney's last ransomware call

If there is anyone in the Bitcoin circle who is recognized as the "White Moonlight", Hal Finney must be on the list. Even if he denies that he is the founder of Bitcoin, many people think he is Satoshi Nakamoto.

He is the first person to receive a Satoshi Bitcoin transfer, was the first person to understand Bitcoin and a very early contributor to provide Bitcoin computing power and code. But it is such a person who has not been able to leave the world quietly in the last few months of his life.

It was the winter of 2014, and Hal Finney had been dealing with ALS for five years, and most of the body's functions were lost, and swallowing became a dangerous move. His wife Fran had to suck, scrub and change tubes every day. That morning, she was bathing Hal with the nurse when the phone rang. The other end of the phone claimed to be the 911 emergency dispatch center, and the voice was very polite: "Madam, is anyone in your family attacked now?"

Fran was confused, and the dispatcher said slowly, "Please calm down, your family will be surrounded by the special police commando immediately. We need your cooperation and come out immediately." She walked to the door, and there were already fully armed special police outside, and the helicopter was still buzzing in the air. A few days ago, a college student shooting happened nearby. The police were particularly nervous. Seeing her holding the phone in her hand, she shouted, "Doesn't the phone! Come out on the lawn!"

She could only do what she did, leaving Hal Finney who was still waiting in the bathroom to suction and unable to move, as well as the nurse and her son. Then Hal Finney was carried onto the lawn by the police, and the wind blew him and his throat was filled with saliva. Fran was afraid that he would choke to death and was almost collapsed.

All this is a "Swatting" (maliciously lie about the case, resulting in the special police being dispatched). The hacker called 911 with a fake call number and lied that "I just killed someone and now I'm going to commit suicide." The purpose is to get the fully armed special police to rush into Hal Finney's house and scare the innocent people in the family.

The person behind the phone started to blackmail Hal Finney's house a month ago, and he spoke out with 1,000 bitcoins - more than $400,000 at the time. Although this money is not much for Hal Finney, after all, he was an early Bitcoin computing power user, it is obvious that most of the money has invested in expensive medical expenses for ALS.

Although this case did not suffer from direct kidnapping, hackers repeatedly intimidated the phone call and threatened to expose the legendary figure lying on the ventilator in pain. Hal Finney's health is getting worse day by day. He has lost his strength to speak normally, but he still has to use his remaining emotions and strength to face a blackmailer hiding in the dark.. Fran was still feeling distressed in an interview later: "This took away his last peace."

Until August 28, 2014, Hal Finney passed away.

Ledger's Snow Nightmare

If Hal Finney's encounter was a shocking story that Bitcoin could not avoid in the early days, then the kidnap of Ledger co-founder David Balland is the most well-known kidnapping case of crypto industry figures recently.

In the early morning of January 21, 2025, the winter night in the small town of Méreau in central France was a little too quiet. Just after two o'clock in the morning, a van quietly parked outside a white-walled villa with a garden. The people in the room were completely unaware that their nightmare had already walked in on the snow.

The person who is targeted is not an ordinary resident, but David Balland. Even if you haven't become a "householder" in the currency circle, you are at least a well-known figure. He is the co-founder of Ledger, a well-known cold wallet company in the crypto industry, and one of the industry benchmarks in the cold wallet track.

As the company's co-founder, David Balland has devoted himself to it since the beginning of Ledger's founding in 2014, and served as the director of the Vierzon factory from 2019 to 2021. In 2019, Ledger set up an exclusive factory in the small town of Vierzon in central France to produce hardware wallets. The company is currently headquartered in Paris and has a total of about 700 employees. The company successfully raised 100 million euros (about 104 million US dollars) in 2023, with a valuation of up to 1.3 billion euros.

David also retired from Ledger in 2021 and instead started two new startups: Le Centre and Ocel. Both companies are committed to bringing museums and art into the Web3 + VR world.

That night, David was at home with his partner, the curtains were half-pulled and the flames were pounding in the fireplace, everything looked ordinary. CanA few minutes later, the man in black kicked open the door, and a group of people held guns and pulled the two of them out of bed, tied them up without saying a word. The cold air suddenly poured into the house, mixed with two thoughts in David's mind: one was whether they could go out alive, and the other was what the kidnappers wanted.

He was roughly stuffed into the car and dragged all the way to an abandoned warehouse dozens of kilometers away. It was as cold as an ice cellar. The kidnapper tied him tightly with tape and even tortured him with a knife. In order to force him to speak, he converted the ransom into cryptocurrency and sent it to him. He was forced to send a message to another founder of Ledger, saying that the extortion limit was clearly written: only cryptocurrency is collected, do not call the police, do not delay, otherwise the consequences will be borne by one's own consequences.

His partner was not spared, and was taken alone to a small town in southern Paris and locked in the back seat of a van. The cold wind poured into the crack of the car. She was tied up all over, her hands and feet were so numb that she could no longer feel. She could only listen to the occasional sound of cars passing outside, hoping that someone would find it.

This group of people know very well: use WhatsApp to contact the ransom, and the mobile phone number is in Southeast Asia, and they have been around several times with VPN. Ledger dares not drag it hard, so they can only send a part of it first to exchange for some time so that the police can follow the clues.

For the kidnappers, it is just money; for the French police, it is a battle of dignity. 230 military policemen and 91 French military police special service members ran one by one, including the network security and intelligence line, first locked the license plate, then positioned the mobile phone, and finally attacked overnight. It took less than 48 hours for French police to get rid of people from being kidnapped to being released.

On the afternoon of January 23, two suspicious vans were taken away by the police force as soon as they stopped on the side of the road. In addition to three men, the companion tied in the back seat and turned pale with cold faces. When the police carried the person out, she almost lost her temperature and couldn't even shout. On the other hand, David was also rescued in the warehouse, and the person was alive, but in the hostage video, the kidnappers really moved the knife in order to force Ledger to pay the money. Even one of his fingers was cut off and the video was sent to the company's senior management. The scene was so bloody that it made people chill.

10 kidnappers were arrested on the spot: 9 males and 1 females, from their early 20s to their 40s, most of whom had long had a criminal record, and the mastermind was a 24-year-old French-Moroccan. thisRetrieving people is just the first step. What awaits them are a number of charges such as "organized violent kidnapping", "armed blackmail", and "torture and ill-treatment" - in France, the maximum sentence can be sentenced to life.

After being rescued, David was sent to the hospital for treatment. His hand injury took time to recover slowly, but more importantly, than that finger, it was more important that the person came back alive.

The "E Guard" that confused his father

The cup of tea was brought by his son himself.

In May 2021, Bethesda, Maryland, USA, this typical middle-class and rich area has mottled trees and clean streets. Anything can alarm the entire neighborhood. That night, Liam handed a cup of hot tea to his father, and quietly sprinkled some white powder into the tea. He smiled and advised his father: "It's a little refreshing to you."

My father didn't think much about it and drank it. Although my son has the bad habit of taking drugs, he is the child he raised. He is the only child he has raised, and he has made up for after arguing. But after this cup of tea, I won’t be able to sleep well overnight, but a coma for two days and almost lost my life.

This powder is not a tonic, but a benzodiazepine sedative—a component similar to a prescription sleeping pill. The high dose is enough to make a person who is not resistant to drugs lose consciousness directly.

That night, after Liam put down his father, quietly picked up his father's phone, skipped the two-step verification, transferred the $400,000 Bitcoin in his account to himself, and exchanged most of it for Ethereum. After doing all this, he left a note: "I'm not a bad guy, I just want to help you and myself. I will give you the best retirement life."

He thought his father would wake up soon, but ignored that non-addicts had almost zero tolerance to this drug. Two days later, a friend found out that the father had been missing for several days and could not get in touch. He panicked and called the police. When the police broke into the door, they found him lying on the bedroom floor, his breath was weak, his dehydration was severe, and his organ function had begun to be disordered.

The doctor said that if it were a few hours later, the person would be gone.

Liam was born in a well-off family in Maryland. After his parents divorced, he was the only one in the family. When I was a child, I played tennis well. After graduating from high school, I founded an online clothing consignment company. Later, I became obsessed with cryptocurrency and began to work as a "financial consultant" for my father.

"You are always too emotional and too reluctant to leave this token." Liam always advises his father like this.

The father gave him $100,000 as principal, and as the account value soared, the two cashed out some of their cryptocurrency holdings in 2018 and made about $350,000 in after-tax profits. However, Liam's drug use began to deteriorate sharply, and he was unconscious every day, moved from his apartment to his family, and eventually disappeared.

As his son's suspicion became increasingly serious, his obsession with the plunge in Bitcoin prices became deeper and deeper. But at that time, the father was worried about his son's judgment, so he double-locked their investment accounts.

"Dad, you need to sell it," the father recalled his son telling him. "No, you have to stop taking drugs," the father replied.

So that cup of tea appeared. After moving the furniture, the two of them had a meal nearby. When they got home, Liam brought the two cups of "special" tea, drinking one cup by himself, and handing it to his father. After the police intervened, they filed a case for "attempted murder", after all, their father almost died. But after an in-depth investigation, the prosecutor found that this was more like a crime with "good intention" when an addict was out of control - he did not intend to actually kill someone, and the case was finally closed with a first-degree attack on the felony. Considering that Liam had no criminal record, actively cooperated with treatment, and his family chose to forgive him, the court sentenced him to strengthen drug rehabilitation and rehabilitation for 125 days in prison, plus 20 years of probation. If there is another violence, he will go to the state prison immediately.

When he walked out of the cell, Liam moved into the rehabilitation group dormitory in Rockville, doing odd jobs during the day and attending drug rehabilitation mutual aid club at night. My father would come to see him, and the two of them sometimes repaired his old Subaru car together. "I apologized to my dad, but I know that just apologizing is useless." Liam said, "I want to let him know with my actions that I am really changing back to that good son."

Maybe the father and son will drink tea together, but this time, the father should smell it first and then drink it.