The frequency of kidnap and ransom attempts on prominent cryptocurrency executives has skyrocketed in recent years.
Referred to, perhaps crudely, in the crypto community as a “$5 wrench attack,” these attempts to extract millions from crypto bigwigs have spurred politicians to mitigate risk.
Policymakers in France are currently working on safeguards, including a prevention platform announced at Paris Blockchain Week yesterday. In the private sector, insurance companies are offering bespoke coverage to crypto execs, which includes awareness and prevention training.
With kidnap and ransom attacks on the rise, the crypto wealthy are adopting new tactics and practices to stay secure.
Why are crypto execs targets?
Ransoming wealthy crypto holders is not a new problem. Cypherpunk and early Bitcoin adopter Jameson Lopp keeps a Github repository of such attacks. While not exhaustive, it has recorded at least 316 since 2014.
Rigel Walsh, a software developer at Swan Bitcoin, was already giving lectures on the topic in 2019, covering different attack vectors, from impersonation to home invasion and kidnapping.
According to Lopp’s repository, 79 ransom attacks occurred in 2025, while already in 2026, media have reported 27 attacks on crypto holders.
This type of crime is hardly exclusive to the crypto-rich, but the nature of digital assets and the industry itself makes crypto executives and investors particularly vulnerable.
Christian Ogden Davies, global head of distribution and innovation at Relm Insurance, told Cointelegraph that some of the new crypto-rich “don’t have big risk infrastructure around them.”
Traditionally, as an organization grows, “you usually then have more people come into your organization like a CEO that’s experienced and maybe a chief risk officer or a chief legal officer, and then they start to look at insurances and how that kind of impacts them.”
As revenue increases, “you might have asset managers and wealth managers who turn around and go, ‘have you talked about or looked at your own personal security?’”
“Instead, in crypto, some people go from zero to hundreds of billions of net worth in weeks or months.”
This lack of concern, or at least attention, to personal security follows them into the very social and friendly space that is crypto. Davies said that crypto is one of the only sectors where “you’ll have five CEOs of competing firms go and sit down for dinner and […] see how things are going.”
Crypto is also highly liquid. Despite the increased amount of attention on crypto, be it through government monitoring and sanctions or private security and analysis services, crypto criminals can still cash out fairly easily.
Davies said that, while countries like North Korea and Iran have been sanctioned heavily, state-connected actors like hacker group Lazarus have still been able to get away with stolen funds. “If you have the right avenue and exit venue for it, you can still make it liquid.”
Related: Bitrefill links Lazarus Group to employee laptop hack, stolen funds
Legal and cultural elements may play a role in eliciting criminal attacks on crypto holders. France, and Paris in particular, has become a hotbed of ransom attacks on the crypto-rich. It “eclipses every other region by a country mile” in terms of crypto ransom attacks, said Davies.
One of the most high-profile attacks was the 2025 kidnapping and ransom of Ledger wallet co-founder David Balland. His colleague and co-founder, Eric Larchevêque, has reportedly said that French law, namely a requirement that entrepreneurs register their names and addresses, is at least partly to blame.
Then there’s the cultural draw. Davies said, “everyone loves Paris […] It’s a beautiful city and it just attracts lots of visitors as well. Whether you’re an A-list celebrity, musician, actor, film star, you want to go out and hang in Paris and go and eat [at] the restaurants and stuff. If you’re a crypto exec, you do the same thing. If you’re an investment banker, you do the same thing. So you do have a lot of high concentration of visiting wealth to that area.”
Overall, the lack of security has created a new reality that “everyone has kind of had to wake up to very violently.”
Crypto execs spend more on personal security
And woke up they have. Spending on personal security among crypto executives has skyrocketed.
In 2024, American crypto exchange Coinbase spent $6.2 million on executive protection for its CEO Brian Armstrong. According to TechCrunch, this was more than the combined security costs of executives for JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Nvidia.
Larchevêque pays over $50,000 a month for security for himself and his family. He has cameras and weapons in his home and has reportedly lobbied for crypto executives to be allowed to carry firearms for their protection.
Related: Spain arrests suspect in 2025 kidnapping of Ledger co-founder
There have also been government-level efforts to address the problem. Yesterday at Paris Blockchain Week, Jean-Didier Berger, minister delegate to the interior minister of France, said his office had launched a prevention platform which has already drawn thousands of sign-ups. The platform will improve security coordination, which Berger said he’ll be working on with Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez in the coming weeks.
At Paris Blockchain Week, police reportedly had a strong presence. In a post on X, The Block’s head of growth Tim Copeland said some conference attendees had police escorts through Paris.
Insurance companies have also seen a surge in interest. Ben Davis, who runs a crypto-centric insurance brokerage in the UK, Native Broking, told Reuters last year, “Two years ago, kidnap and ransom wasn’t really a big problem. No one really wanted to talk about it. Now 100% of our clients are talking about it.”
Christian Ogden Davies told Cointelegraph that Relm started offering a K&R (kidnap and ransom) policy after massive client interest. “The reason we launched it is because we’re being asked by so many people for it.”
The product offers security expertise and remuneration of funds to clients should they find themselves in a situation where they need to pay a ransom. But much of the policy, and of mitigating possible ransom attacks generally, is making sure the client knows how to avoid that situation altogether.
“There’s initial training and education of the people first. Try not to get yourself in that situation. This is what you say. This is what you don’t say. This is who you speak to, how you speak, how you engage.”
“Don’t turn left down that dark alley. It might be a shortcut, but just take that normal route.”
