is to cut off their fingers

David Balland is one of the co -founders of Ledger. He no longer works actively in the company and retired with his partner to a town in the central part of France. In January both were kidnapped at gunpoint. Shortly after the kidnappers sent a video to ask for a rescue: in it they showed how one of the fingers to Balland was cut. The violent event is just an example of a dangerous trend in recent months.

Wave of kidnappings and attacks. As they point out In The Wall Street Journalin recent months there have been several cases of kidnapping attempts or attacks with violence that have suffered people with an alleged great heritage in cryptocurrencies.

“Help! Help!”. The daughter of the CEO of Paymium, a market for the sale of cryptodivisas in France, suffered an attempt to kidnapping recently. The woman went with her son and her husband when Uns men tried to put her in a white van. The woman asked for help, the husband struggled with the attackers and a neighbor who was close took the child to try to take him away. When other neighbors approached the attackers ended up getting into the van and fleeing.

All over the world. Last September a man was sentenced to 47 years in prison for leading a band of criminals who carried out several assaults on the homes of people with large amounts of cryptocurrencies. In one of them they attacked a 76 -year -old man in Durham (USA) and threatened to cut the genitals.

In Spain, too. On February 1, a woman appeared at the Marbella police station to warn that her son was kidnapped. The victim, a “trader” of London cryptocurrencies, ended using a trick to warn a friend in London and in fact he escaped from his captors. The founder of Tuenti, Zaryn Dentzel, was also kidnapped in 2021 to steal 25 million euros in Bitcoins. Its captors ended up being arrested and have been Nine years in prison.

Better not to presume. Killian Desnnos is a French influencer residing in Malta and has often talked about how rich it is thanks to cryptocurrencies. In August 2023, a person disguised as a messenger from Amazon called his father’s house and kidnapped him. He sent a video pointing to the father with a gun. He ended up paying the rescue, the father was released the next day and the police found and arrested the two leaders of the kidnapping. “Showing on the Internet was not a good idea, I realize,” counted in X shortly after of the incident.

What to hack. Traditionally criminals have tried to steal cryptocurrencies through cyber attacks to markets for the sale of these assets, but in recent times there are also numerous direct attacks to recognized people for being part of this segment and who supposedly have large amounts of money in the form of cryptodivisas. Kames LOPP, co -founder of the Bitcoin Casa security company, explains that “many people are reaching the security level of hiding money under the mattress,” and cryptocurrencies thus risk physical attacks.

Data thefts do not help. How do criminals identify their victims? One of the possibilities is that they obtain such data from the robberies that some companies in this segment have suffered. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, four days ago, admitted that someone had stolen the data of 1% of the users of their platform (about 100,000 affected are estimated). Before it had already happened with Ledger, which in 2020 also suffered an intrusion that made it The data of 270,000 clients will be filtered.

Identify cryptocurrencies. In France, as in Spain, there are public records of the owners of the companies and in them you can find the homes of those entrepreneurs. Taylor Monahan, who works in cybersecurity in Metamask, explains that cybercriminals manage to cross databases and even pay for sources of information. Doxing is an increasingly common problem And it allows attackers to obtain personal information and then harass it or, as in these cases, threaten to kidnappings or violent attacks.

Image | Amjith s

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