Digital Wallet
By Pankaj K
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Charges Filed, Suspects Still at Large. The Béthune prosecutor's office has opened a formal investigation, classifying the case as…
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France Leads the World in Crypto Kidnappings. France has been dealing with a sharp rise in these attacks for months.
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A Shifting Target Profile. What's changed recently, and what cases like this one make pretty clear, is that the target…
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Four men kicked in the door. A family of four, bound with black tape, spent hours inside their own home while strangers tore the place apart looking for crypto codes.
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The attack happened early Sunday morning in Vendin-le-Vieil, a small town in northern France.
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The family couldn't free themselves in time to raise the alarm.
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The Béthune prosecutor's office has opened a formal investigation, classifying the case as kidnapping and extortion carried out by an organized gang.
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The case is unusual in at least one important way. Wrench attacks — the term used for physical assaults designed to extract crypto credentials — have historically focused on…
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That's the part that probably keeps investigators up at night.
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France has been dealing with a sharp rise in these attacks for months. The national anti-organized crime prosecutor's office has tracked more than 70 kidnappings and unlawful…
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Read also: French Tax Breach Fuels Surge in Crypto Scams Targeting 678,000 Users
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It's not entirely clear why France specifically, though the country has a large and relatively early-adopting crypto community, and some of those early adopters accumulated…
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Globally, the financial damage from wrench attacks is significant and growing fast. Chainalysis has put losses from these attacks at $30 million so far in 2026.
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The Vendin-le-Vieil attack lasted more than three hours. Three hours inside a home with a bound family, two of them children. The assailants weren't rushed. They weren't panicked.
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What's changed recently, and what cases like this one make pretty clear, is that the target profile for these attacks is widening.
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