CRYPTO NEWSWIRE: How to Not Get Kidnapped for Your Bitcoin...
NEW YORK TIMES: Escaping zipties, hiring bodyguards and other practical lessons in self-defense for crypto traders, after a series of gruesome crimes spooked the community.
AVOIDING "WRENCH ATTACKS"... Pete Kayll, a musclebound veteran of Britain’s Royal Marines, had an unusual instruction for the Bitcoin investors gathered in Switzerland in late October.
“Just bite your way out,” he told them.
It was the final day of a weekend-long cryptocurrency convention on the shore of Lake Lugano, near the Italian border.
A small group of investors had lined up in a conference room to have their hands bound with plastic zipties.
Now they were learning how to get them off.
“Your teeth will get through anything,” Mr. Kayll advised. “But it will bloody well hurt.”
Most people don’t go to an international crypto conference expecting to learn how to gnaw through plastic.
But after hours of panels devoted to topics like Bitcoin-collateralized loans, these investors were looking for something more practical.
They wanted to know what to do if they were grabbed on the street and thrown into the back of a van.
Already paranoid about scams, hacks and market turmoil, wealthy crypto investors have lately become terrified about a much graver threat: torture and kidnapping.
This year, crypto investors or their families have been targeted by assailants more than 60 times, according to a tallies of public reports, a string of gruesome attacks that has shocked the industry and made headlines worldwide.
In France, the father of a crypto influencer was found in the trunk of an attacker’s car — bound, beaten and covered in petrol.
Thieves in Minnesota held a family at gunpoint for nine hours, demanding access to $8 million in crypto.
And in Manhattan, federal prosecutors charged two men with kidnapping and torturing a crypto trader inside a luxurious 17-room townhouse.
In crypto circles, these episodes are known as “wrench attacks,” a reference to a widely shared cartoon in which a computer expert’s high-tech security is foiled by a thief who threatens to hit him with a wrench until he gives up his password.
The recent surge of wrench attacks has been fueled partly by the rising price of Bitcoin, which hit a record of $126,000 last month, minting a new generation of millionaires and even billionaires, many of whom have little personal security....
nytimes.com/2025/11/17/busin…
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