Two instances of crypto kidnapping happened recently in France just a few weeks apart. The first was the father of a crypto milionnaire who was rescued after a few days, missing a finger. The second is the daughter of a crypto CEO who fended off a kidnapping in broad daylight in the center of Paris, while she was with her husband and baby. Insane stuff.
This will only go worse and harder to protect from. Most of the instances I heard about were carried by "amateurs", which makes all this quite unpredictable.
Thinking of cryptocurrencies, and trade with them, as the wild west, it shows that many people out there will turn into absolute animals and take the rights of others if the law wasn't there holding a gun to their heads to keep them in check.
This write up is very interesting to me for one main reason. It underscores how incredibly important it is for anyone dealing in this stuff to do the following…
Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.
Pseudo-anonymity, with the emphasis on the pseudo part, is only as good as you. If you truly believe in Bitcoin and all that implies, it really is in your best interest to be quiet and keep it to yourself, and this knife cuts in more ways than you might expect. You don’t have layers of security like at a traditional bank. You are the weakest link wrt private keys and storage.
Also, even talking about it amongst folks you think are your friends, like fellow Bitcoin users, isn’t wise either. Hypothetically, if you became exceedingly wealthy on paper, it would be in the interest of others to take you out of the equation so you can’t cash out. If that means a five dollar (or whatever they cost these days) wrench to the head so you stop moving… now that value is locked up in the blockchain! Could this happen to any given bitcoin users with just a few satoshi or whatnot? Very unlikely, but don’t forget that a decade and a half ago, a handful of bitcoins could cost you very little money. Now it has gone up exponentially in value and would make you a big fat target.
There are those on /r/bitcoin that think a wrench won’t ever break their wills and spirits. That math is invincible. Don’t think they’ve ever been on the wrong side of one before. Math might be bulletproof, but wetware is very fragile.
The tension is between needing to keep your mouth shut (for your own safety) and needing to loudly evangelize crypto at every opportunity (because its value is still mostly predicated on hype and FOMO, which must be maintained). For people to believe the narrative that buying crypto will make them rich, there has to be crypto-rich people shouting about how crypto-rich they are.
The interesting thing to me about this is watching how we've changed over the past 40 years. As a kid, it was impressed up on kids to not talk to strangers. You don't tell people where you live. You don't tell people anything more than necessary. Now, people share the most intimate details of their daily lives. People share/invite random strangers to their accounts without any concerns about who they are or what they might do. People just do not think about how the most benign of posts can be used for nefarious purposes by someone else. So we've gone from share nothing to over sharing everything.
It’s definitely changed from generation to generation.
During covid some SWEs had pretty sweet gigs due to lowered expectations and a rush on talent. And what do a small fraction of SWEs do? Make “life in the day of” videos that glamorize how cushy and easy-going it is, painting the whole group of SWEs as spoiled and entitled who make too much money. Point is they could’ve just realized they had it good and kept quiet.
But, no, they had to hustle for internet points, even risking their job inadvertently. It’s unbelievable to me how fast we flipped from the internet being an accessory to life to it being a surrogate for actual social interaction.
Ehh, changes in privacy expectations have gone both ways. 40 years ago people also voluntarily listed their home address and telephone number in phone books that would be mailed to the whole community.
If you think the telephone book is any where close to the same thing as the amount of information available via a web search, then you're just not even trying to have a serious conversation. At the time of printed phone books, it's not like you could pull out the super computer in your pocket and get turn by turn directions to that address. If you were fancy, you could maybe pull out your Mapsco and figure out how to get there, but only if that address was in the same area as the set of Mapsco books you had on hand.
You could go to the bookstore and get an appropriate map or two pretty easily. Or a gas station. Or join the AAA and get them to put together a TripTik. Or some combination.
Sure it'd take longer than pulling up directions on your phone does now but if you're planning a cross-country trip to kidnap someone and beat their passphrases out of them or demand a ransom from their family or whatever then you've probably got some other plans to make. If it's a total impulse then you just grab your duct tape, chainsaw, masks, and continental-scale road atlas and hit the road; when you get to your target's state you can pick up maps that'll get you to their place at the first gas station you hit. Don't make jokes about why you're on a road trip when you stop at the whimsical roadside attraction shaped like a dinosaur, someone will come forwards when your case makes the news.
So just another point on this… you are probably not as anonymous on the internet as you might think. You can brag about wealth in cryptocurrency. But use a handle long enough, or even across several accounts that can somehow be linked, and a fingerprint of you could be constructed. It really can be done with some forensic analysis.
And I think it all boils down to the fact that some humans need to make noise about their successes so they feel validated. Much like the cryptocurrency evangelists, they probably can’t help themselves because they want to ensure they defend “the mission” even if it comes at great personal cost in the long run.
I've recently quoted on here something about learning to spend what's in your pocket. That is a special case of the same general principle evinced here, which is that if you don't put work into maintaining a broad perspective, you lose the ability to distinguish what you're used to and what's ordinary.
It's worth worrying about in the general case, too. There are subtler and much more noxious failure modes here than merely getting beaned with a Swedish nut rounder.
Matt Levine had a recent article about this. Another part of the problem is that some BTC repositories* got hacked and the hackers got people's names and addresses and maybe quantity of BTC
So, even if you keep your mouth shut, if people can get your address, you're a potential target.
*(I can't recall the details and I don't know enough about crypto to know if I'm using the proper terminology)
* edit: here's the article. skip down to "$5 wrench attack"
This kind of works, until you have a medical issue that impairs your brain enough,an event that loses hardware keys or backups, or you care about possible inheritors when you die.
Everything you do to keep keys safe from some risks weakens your posture against other risks. Making sure most people don't know about your holdings is nice and all, but ultimately key management is a really hard problem. It's hard enough for companies, but I'd argue it's even worse for individuals.
You are correct about key management being hard. I’ve been telling folks that absolutely insist on getting into Bitcoin that it’s best to leave out any notions of convenience at all, as convenience is the enemy of security. If you absolutely must have the stuff, stick to a cold wallet using pen and paper. It still has its own downsides, but it’s arguably one of the most simple ways to handle the keys problem.
Exactly. Hence why I don’t advocate for any cryptocurrency at all, personally. It’s fraught with peril and the juice really isn’t worth the squeeze to me. Others may have a different calculus, but I’d rather not be looking over my shoulder constantly.
Oh, same, I've never touched the stuff. That was pure intuition 15 years ago; these days I think of it as a longterm investment paying major dividends in peace of mind.
Of course it would be easy to say one's never touched crypto, and not so easy to prove, as with any negative. I don't care. If I ever get bounced with a King Dick, it'll far more likely be because I said something someone didn't like - which seems to happen about as often as I open my mouth, these days. Or because I said something someone failed to comprehend and so took insult at. Brains are severely out of fashion this decade, and I can't seem to help having some, so presumably someone will seek to scatter them sooner or later. Why not? I hear it's the last argument of kings, and their time too seems coming 'round again.
In any case they better not let me hear them coming. Wiser to spin the block in a car, really. I've never been hit with a wrench before, but it did once take more than a hammer to get me off my feet.
Why don't we hear about this happening to people who are equally wealthy in classical (non-crypto) assets? Are they more discreet and harder to make out or are there protections in place at, e.g., banks that limit the efficacy of these kinds of attacks? I guess most wealth people don't have enough of their wealth in liquid assets to be a good target but people with lot's of crypto assets can easily transfer it all.
Sure you can pressure people to transfer money from banks to you. But that will be easier to trace and the transactions could just be reversed. If moving all your wealth the bank is likely to ask some questions, maybe want to see you in person.
With crypto the philosophy is “be your own bank”. It’s like keeping your money under the mattress. So you are a much more promising target.
Kidnapping for ransom used to be big business for US organized crime. Then the law changed to basically outlaw paying ransoms (all negotiations had to go through the FBI) and while a few people died, kidnapping for ransom in the US largely died as well after the 80s.
When you create your own keys, you essentially become the bank. Additionally, with exchanges or other custodial platforms, once you move funds, the transactions are irreversible and can be very difficult, or even impossible, to trace.
Why would you say they are difficult/impossible to trace? It's publicly visible where it goes and where it gets eventually spent. Ill gained bitcoin even gets flagged and its very hard to spend.
It seems like quite a stretch to think the public feels significantly greater affinity to wealthy people who hold stocks, real-estate, and other traditional assets compared to cryptocurrency speculators. It seems like a much more parsimonious explanation that the attacks are more prevalent in the less secure medium since attackers are more likely to succeed.
“Be your own bank” makes a cool bumper sticker but it’s like saying “be your own pilot” or “do your own surgery” in terms of complexity and risk. There’s a reason why these things traditionally involve teams of people with various safety precautions baked in to make attacks riskier.
The alt text does say "Also, I would be hard-pressed to find that wrench for $5." so I guess even at the time without inflation it wasn't really possible
It could be a second-hand wrench. Or maybe smuggled in without tariffs: a 1-foot, 3-pound wrench is $3.45 on Taobao (including shipping, a pair of gloves and a roll of PTFE tape). It might not be Snap-On but it'll probably survive being hit with a few crypto speculator skulls.
Or tools from the current victim. Someone broke into my house using the utensils from my grill on the patio to try to pry open a rear window before just using them to break the glass.
Mugging, larceny, robbery, assault & battery, a stick-up.
Kids these days.... Always inventing new words for old ideas, amirite?
More seriously: I'm still a little unclear how stealing crypto is feasible. There's a ledger, right? Tumblers are really that effective at hiding the chain of custody?
At some point(s) the cyberspace "durable digital asset" (h/t a15z) has to emerge in meatspace, right? Even if it pops up in Russia, NK, or Golden Triangle, there's always some heads to bash, fingers to break. Right?
I imagine it works like the stolen art world. You can’t just put that lost Picasso on auction at Sotheby’s, but the right buyer will take that wallet off your hands and wash it.
What's the "unintended consequence" here? That bad guys will try to steal valuable stuff? Is that really "unintended" in any meaningful way? Does it make sense to say that people stealing iPhones is an "unintended consequence" of the iPhone?
> Does it make sense to say that people stealing iPhones is an "unintended consequence" of the iPhone?
To torture the metaphor a bit, crypto is more like an iPhone competitor which markets itself around the supposed benefits of not having anti-theft features like factory reset protection. If you go out of your way to refuse already existing safeguards against your stuff being stolen then you don't really get to be surprised when thieves single you out as an easy mark.
The metaphor implies that iPhones aren't routinely stolen. But they are, iPhone theft is actually pretty common.
Although the crypto might be relevant being attacked is something that any asset owner has to worry about (even for assets like houses, oddly enough - I suspect big mansions would be something of a thief draw). The attacks are unintended consequences of wealth as opposed to any specific property of crypto - having an equal amount of cash on hand isn't safe either.
Two instances of crypto kidnapping happened recently in France just a few weeks apart. The first was the father of a crypto milionnaire who was rescued after a few days, missing a finger. The second is the daughter of a crypto CEO who fended off a kidnapping in broad daylight in the center of Paris, while she was with her husband and baby. Insane stuff.
This will only go worse and harder to protect from. Most of the instances I heard about were carried by "amateurs", which makes all this quite unpredictable.
Thinking of cryptocurrencies, and trade with them, as the wild west, it shows that many people out there will turn into absolute animals and take the rights of others if the law wasn't there holding a gun to their heads to keep them in check.
Recently happened in Montréal too and yes, very amateurish operation that went very very wrong: https://globalnews.ca/news/10868204/quebec-crypto-influencer...
Literally yesterday:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/24/nyregion/crypto-investor-...
Discussed here:
Crypto investor charged with kidnapping and torturing - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44085188 - May 2025 (67 comments)
This write up is very interesting to me for one main reason. It underscores how incredibly important it is for anyone dealing in this stuff to do the following…
Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.
Pseudo-anonymity, with the emphasis on the pseudo part, is only as good as you. If you truly believe in Bitcoin and all that implies, it really is in your best interest to be quiet and keep it to yourself, and this knife cuts in more ways than you might expect. You don’t have layers of security like at a traditional bank. You are the weakest link wrt private keys and storage.
Also, even talking about it amongst folks you think are your friends, like fellow Bitcoin users, isn’t wise either. Hypothetically, if you became exceedingly wealthy on paper, it would be in the interest of others to take you out of the equation so you can’t cash out. If that means a five dollar (or whatever they cost these days) wrench to the head so you stop moving… now that value is locked up in the blockchain! Could this happen to any given bitcoin users with just a few satoshi or whatnot? Very unlikely, but don’t forget that a decade and a half ago, a handful of bitcoins could cost you very little money. Now it has gone up exponentially in value and would make you a big fat target.
There are those on /r/bitcoin that think a wrench won’t ever break their wills and spirits. That math is invincible. Don’t think they’ve ever been on the wrong side of one before. Math might be bulletproof, but wetware is very fragile.
The tension is between needing to keep your mouth shut (for your own safety) and needing to loudly evangelize crypto at every opportunity (because its value is still mostly predicated on hype and FOMO, which must be maintained). For people to believe the narrative that buying crypto will make them rich, there has to be crypto-rich people shouting about how crypto-rich they are.
That is quite a balancing act, isn’t it?
Not before Miami slides into the Atlantic...
Lol
> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.
The interesting thing to me about this is watching how we've changed over the past 40 years. As a kid, it was impressed up on kids to not talk to strangers. You don't tell people where you live. You don't tell people anything more than necessary. Now, people share the most intimate details of their daily lives. People share/invite random strangers to their accounts without any concerns about who they are or what they might do. People just do not think about how the most benign of posts can be used for nefarious purposes by someone else. So we've gone from share nothing to over sharing everything.
It’s definitely changed from generation to generation.
During covid some SWEs had pretty sweet gigs due to lowered expectations and a rush on talent. And what do a small fraction of SWEs do? Make “life in the day of” videos that glamorize how cushy and easy-going it is, painting the whole group of SWEs as spoiled and entitled who make too much money. Point is they could’ve just realized they had it good and kept quiet.
But, no, they had to hustle for internet points, even risking their job inadvertently. It’s unbelievable to me how fast we flipped from the internet being an accessory to life to it being a surrogate for actual social interaction.
Ehh, changes in privacy expectations have gone both ways. 40 years ago people also voluntarily listed their home address and telephone number in phone books that would be mailed to the whole community.
If you think the telephone book is any where close to the same thing as the amount of information available via a web search, then you're just not even trying to have a serious conversation. At the time of printed phone books, it's not like you could pull out the super computer in your pocket and get turn by turn directions to that address. If you were fancy, you could maybe pull out your Mapsco and figure out how to get there, but only if that address was in the same area as the set of Mapsco books you had on hand.
You could go to the bookstore and get an appropriate map or two pretty easily. Or a gas station. Or join the AAA and get them to put together a TripTik. Or some combination.
Sure it'd take longer than pulling up directions on your phone does now but if you're planning a cross-country trip to kidnap someone and beat their passphrases out of them or demand a ransom from their family or whatever then you've probably got some other plans to make. If it's a total impulse then you just grab your duct tape, chainsaw, masks, and continental-scale road atlas and hit the road; when you get to your target's state you can pick up maps that'll get you to their place at the first gas station you hit. Don't make jokes about why you're on a road trip when you stop at the whimsical roadside attraction shaped like a dinosaur, someone will come forwards when your case makes the news.
So just another point on this… you are probably not as anonymous on the internet as you might think. You can brag about wealth in cryptocurrency. But use a handle long enough, or even across several accounts that can somehow be linked, and a fingerprint of you could be constructed. It really can be done with some forensic analysis.
And I think it all boils down to the fact that some humans need to make noise about their successes so they feel validated. Much like the cryptocurrency evangelists, they probably can’t help themselves because they want to ensure they defend “the mission” even if it comes at great personal cost in the long run.
I've recently quoted on here something about learning to spend what's in your pocket. That is a special case of the same general principle evinced here, which is that if you don't put work into maintaining a broad perspective, you lose the ability to distinguish what you're used to and what's ordinary.
It's worth worrying about in the general case, too. There are subtler and much more noxious failure modes here than merely getting beaned with a Swedish nut rounder.
> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.
Matt Levine had a recent article about this. Another part of the problem is that some BTC repositories* got hacked and the hackers got people's names and addresses and maybe quantity of BTC
So, even if you keep your mouth shut, if people can get your address, you're a potential target.
*(I can't recall the details and I don't know enough about crypto to know if I'm using the proper terminology)
* edit: here's the article. skip down to "$5 wrench attack"
https://archive.is/lUNox
This kind of works, until you have a medical issue that impairs your brain enough,an event that loses hardware keys or backups, or you care about possible inheritors when you die.
Everything you do to keep keys safe from some risks weakens your posture against other risks. Making sure most people don't know about your holdings is nice and all, but ultimately key management is a really hard problem. It's hard enough for companies, but I'd argue it's even worse for individuals.
You are correct about key management being hard. I’ve been telling folks that absolutely insist on getting into Bitcoin that it’s best to leave out any notions of convenience at all, as convenience is the enemy of security. If you absolutely must have the stuff, stick to a cold wallet using pen and paper. It still has its own downsides, but it’s arguably one of the most simple ways to handle the keys problem.
> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut.
With events like the recent Coinbase breach, is this even enough?
Nobody has to use Coinbase. That said, yes you aren’t wrong. The more intermediaries you deal with, the higher your exposure risk.
That, and there's zero backward or forward secrecy by design. Avoiding intermediaries can't ameliorate the hazards of the protocol.
Exactly. Hence why I don’t advocate for any cryptocurrency at all, personally. It’s fraught with peril and the juice really isn’t worth the squeeze to me. Others may have a different calculus, but I’d rather not be looking over my shoulder constantly.
Oh, same, I've never touched the stuff. That was pure intuition 15 years ago; these days I think of it as a longterm investment paying major dividends in peace of mind.
Of course it would be easy to say one's never touched crypto, and not so easy to prove, as with any negative. I don't care. If I ever get bounced with a King Dick, it'll far more likely be because I said something someone didn't like - which seems to happen about as often as I open my mouth, these days. Or because I said something someone failed to comprehend and so took insult at. Brains are severely out of fashion this decade, and I can't seem to help having some, so presumably someone will seek to scatter them sooner or later. Why not? I hear it's the last argument of kings, and their time too seems coming 'round again.
In any case they better not let me hear them coming. Wiser to spin the block in a car, really. I've never been hit with a wrench before, but it did once take more than a hammer to get me off my feet.
Why don't we hear about this happening to people who are equally wealthy in classical (non-crypto) assets? Are they more discreet and harder to make out or are there protections in place at, e.g., banks that limit the efficacy of these kinds of attacks? I guess most wealth people don't have enough of their wealth in liquid assets to be a good target but people with lot's of crypto assets can easily transfer it all.
Those people keep their money in banks.
Sure you can pressure people to transfer money from banks to you. But that will be easier to trace and the transactions could just be reversed. If moving all your wealth the bank is likely to ask some questions, maybe want to see you in person.
With crypto the philosophy is “be your own bank”. It’s like keeping your money under the mattress. So you are a much more promising target.
Kidnapping for ransom used to be big business for US organized crime. Then the law changed to basically outlaw paying ransoms (all negotiations had to go through the FBI) and while a few people died, kidnapping for ransom in the US largely died as well after the 80s.
When you create your own keys, you essentially become the bank. Additionally, with exchanges or other custodial platforms, once you move funds, the transactions are irreversible and can be very difficult, or even impossible, to trace.
Why would you say they are difficult/impossible to trace? It's publicly visible where it goes and where it gets eventually spent. Ill gained bitcoin even gets flagged and its very hard to spend.
Because the public doesn’t relate to these victims.
It seems like quite a stretch to think the public feels significantly greater affinity to wealthy people who hold stocks, real-estate, and other traditional assets compared to cryptocurrency speculators. It seems like a much more parsimonious explanation that the attacks are more prevalent in the less secure medium since attackers are more likely to succeed.
“Be your own bank” makes a cool bumper sticker but it’s like saying “be your own pilot” or “do your own surgery” in terms of complexity and risk. There’s a reason why these things traditionally involve teams of people with various safety precautions baked in to make attacks riskier.
Jameson Lopp maintains a comprehensive list at https://github.com/jlopp/physical-bitcoin-attacks
Side joke: with inflation the XKCD $5 wrench attack (https://xkcd.com/538/) is no longer possible.
The alt text does say "Also, I would be hard-pressed to find that wrench for $5." so I guess even at the time without inflation it wasn't really possible
For Americans now difficult. Rest of the world can still order cheaply in China ;)
Maybe those orders should be limited given how the tools have no other valid use than password extraction
You speak with the same sort of hard-earned wisdom of someone who has also snapped a few cheap wrenches in half.
It could be a second-hand wrench. Or maybe smuggled in without tariffs: a 1-foot, 3-pound wrench is $3.45 on Taobao (including shipping, a pair of gloves and a roll of PTFE tape). It might not be Snap-On but it'll probably survive being hit with a few crypto speculator skulls.
The key is to have made the investment long ago. I never put money in crypto but I do own two large pipe wrenches from the mid 1990s.
Or a stolen wrench. If you are already on the path of criminality.
Hey man, some of us have limits (/s)
Seriously though, most B&E’s will use tools stolen from some prior victim. Why spend money you don’t need to, or something.
Or tools from the current victim. Someone broke into my house using the utensils from my grill on the patio to try to pry open a rear window before just using them to break the glass.
Also you can't be filmed at the hardware shop buying the weapon. Premeditation makes things worse if you do get caught.
https://www.harborfreight.com/hand-tools/wrenches/18-in-stee...
$7.99
They also have an 8-inch wrench on sale for $3 but I'd spend the extra for the pipe wrench.
Better whackin' with an 18-incher.
No worries, now you can simply use $5 of Toblerone lol https://archive.ph/TZ9oq
Next they'll hit someone over the head with a shitcoin to try and steal their wrench!
Mugging, larceny, robbery, assault & battery, a stick-up.
Kids these days.... Always inventing new words for old ideas, amirite?
More seriously: I'm still a little unclear how stealing crypto is feasible. There's a ledger, right? Tumblers are really that effective at hiding the chain of custody?
At some point(s) the cyberspace "durable digital asset" (h/t a15z) has to emerge in meatspace, right? Even if it pops up in Russia, NK, or Golden Triangle, there's always some heads to bash, fingers to break. Right?
I imagine it works like the stolen art world. You can’t just put that lost Picasso on auction at Sotheby’s, but the right buyer will take that wallet off your hands and wash it.
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Generating a bad LLM summary of articles is poor form.
(Especially since all the markdown is just visual noise)
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What's the "unintended consequence" here? That bad guys will try to steal valuable stuff? Is that really "unintended" in any meaningful way? Does it make sense to say that people stealing iPhones is an "unintended consequence" of the iPhone?
> Does it make sense to say that people stealing iPhones is an "unintended consequence" of the iPhone?
To torture the metaphor a bit, crypto is more like an iPhone competitor which markets itself around the supposed benefits of not having anti-theft features like factory reset protection. If you go out of your way to refuse already existing safeguards against your stuff being stolen then you don't really get to be surprised when thieves single you out as an easy mark.
The metaphor implies that iPhones aren't routinely stolen. But they are, iPhone theft is actually pretty common.
Although the crypto might be relevant being attacked is something that any asset owner has to worry about (even for assets like houses, oddly enough - I suspect big mansions would be something of a thief draw). The attacks are unintended consequences of wealth as opposed to any specific property of crypto - having an equal amount of cash on hand isn't safe either.
I suspect most folks don't carry around that much cash, and if they do they certainly don't tell everybody about it.
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I guess the name is in reference to https://xkcd.com/538/
They quite literally say this explicitly in the first few paragraphs. No need to guess.