France Sees Alarming Surge in Crypto-Related Attacks with 90 Victims in 7 Months

France has a serious problem. Ninety crypto-related incidents — kidnappings, extortions, violent thefts — were recorded by French authorities between January 1 and mid-August 2026. That’s not a full year. That’s seven and a half months, and France is already ahead of the USA and the UK in sheer volume of what security professionals call “wrench attacks”: criminals physically assaulting people to grab their digital assets.

The numbers came straight from the French Interior Ministry. In that same window, 223 arrests were made. Of those, 126 individuals ended up behind bars. It’s a significant enforcement response — but the attacks kept coming anyway. Comparisons with prior years are basically impossible here, since France only started collecting this specific data in 2026. So there’s no clean baseline. What’s clear is that the problem is bad enough that authorities felt the need to start counting.

How Bad Is It, Really?

Depends who you ask. Chainalysis tracked 30 known incidents. Security firm Gart.io recorded 73 attacks. The Interior Ministry’s own figure sits at 90. The gap between those numbers probably comes down to what gets reported versus what gets documented through other channels — victims who don’t go to police, incidents captured through open-source research, that kind of thing. Either way, all three figures put France at the top of the global list.

And it’s not just Paris anymore. Attacks have spread to Strasbourg, Marseille, Toulouse. The geography is widening, which is a bad sign. Criminals aren’t clustering around one city where they know the terrain — they’re operating nationally, which means this isn’t a local gang problem. It’s organized.

French authorities seem to agree. Investigations are being routed through JUNALCO, the specialized organized crime jurisdiction. That’s not where you send a simple robbery case. JUNALCO handles complex criminal networks, and the decision to involve it says a lot about how seriously the government is taking the scale of what’s happening.

Data Breaches Gave Criminals a Target List

The surge didn’t come from nowhere. Two major data breaches fed directly into it.

First: a 2024 breach involving the French tax authority. Personal and financial details of taxpayers got out. Crypto holders were among those exposed, and that information apparently circulated in places where criminals could use it. Then, in January 2026, Waltio — a tax reporting firm used by crypto investors — disclosed a breach affecting 50,000 users. Names, financial data, probably wallet-adjacent information. All of it potentially useful to someone planning a targeted robbery.

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That’s the thing about wrench attacks. They’re not random. Perpetrators do their homework — social media, blockchain data, leaked databases. They figure out who holds meaningful amounts of crypto, where those people live, who their family members are. Then they move. And because the threat is physical rather than digital, no amount of cold storage or two-factor authentication helps when someone’s at your door.

Forty percent of incidents in France involve relatives or acquaintances of the primary target. Globally, that figure sits at 25-30%. France is running well above average on that metric, which tells you something about how these criminal networks operate locally — they’re using personal connections as leverage, not just going after the asset holder directly.

High-Profile Cases and What They Show

One case got significant attention. The wife of Sébastien Borget, co-founder of The Sandbox, was the target of an attempted abduction. Attackers used deception and impersonation to try to get access. It didn’t work — but the attempt itself is telling. Borget is a public figure in the crypto world. His identity, his role, his approximate wealth — none of that is secret. That’s exactly the kind of profile that ends up on a criminal’s shortlist when leaked data confirms the target is worth pursuing.

Another case involved a couple who moved into a home previously owned by crypto millionaires. They faced repeated break-ins. They weren’t even the original targets. The criminals had outdated information, or didn’t care to update it, and the new residents paid the price. That’s how indiscriminate this can get when you’re working from a data breach rather than real-time intelligence.

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The broader issue here isn’t just France’s enforcement gap. It’s the fact that data breaches in the crypto sector carry physical consequences in a way that breaches in other industries often don’t. If your email gets leaked, someone might phish you. If your crypto holdings and home address get leaked together, someone might show up with zip ties.

Security experts have flagged France as a case study in that risk. The 2024 tax authority breach set the stage. Waltio’s 2026 incident widened the exposure to 50,000 more people. And the attacks followed, methodically, in ways that track closely with what was exposed. It’s not a coincidence.

French authorities are pushing hard on enforcement — 223 arrests in seven months is a real number. But the pipeline of potential victims created by those two breaches isn’t closed. Fifty thousand Waltio users had their data exposed. The Interior Ministry counted 90 incidents. That gap is still very large.