A couple in Le Chesnay-Rocquencourt, near Versailles, answered their door to find men dressed as police officers. Within minutes, under threat of a knife and the full theatre of a law enforcement raid, they had transferred €900,000 in Bitcoin to their fake police attackers. The men were gone before the real police arrived.
Criminals in France posed as police officers and forced a couple at knifepoint to transfer $1M in $BTC.
No wallet was hacked. The victim was forced to approve the transaction himself. pic.twitter.com/o8JXdE9suE
— Token Metrics (@tokenmetricsinc) April 21, 2026
This was not a hack. No exchange was breached. No phishing link was clicked. France recorded 19 so-called wrench attacks in 2025 alone, the highest count in Europe. Globally, verified cases jumped 75% to 72 incidents that same year. The pattern is accelerating.
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The Pattern: Crypto Wealth
A wrench attack, the industry term borrowed from the security community’s darkly practical shorthand, is using physical force or the credible threat of it to extract a private key or compel a transfer. Security researcher Jameson Lopp has tracked over 70 documented cases worldwide, with France emerging as what he describes as a European epicenter, including the high-profile abduction of Ledger David Balland.
🇫🇷LEDGER CO-FOUNDER KIDNAPPED FOR CRYPTO RANSOM RESCUED BY FRENCH AUTHORITIES
French police rescued Ledger co-founder David Balland and his wife after their abduction for crypto ransom.
Balland, hospitalized with injuries, was found 30 miles from home, while his wife was tied… pic.twitter.com/xsFggv4bSi
— Mario Nawfal (@MarioNawfal) January 26, 2025
Cryptocurrency’s core feature, that whoever controls the private key controls the funds, becomes its most dangerous liability the moment an attacker is standing in your living room. A safe resists a burglar who breaks in while you are away. It offers no protection at all when someone is holding a weapon to your head and asking you to open it yourself.
This is why physical coercion bypasses every layer of conventional crypto safety. Two-factor authentication, strong passwords, a reputable exchange. None of it matters when the attack vector is you, not your device. And this is precisely why social engineering at the physical level is now the fastest-growing category of crypto crime for retail investors.
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The Mechanism: How Fake Bitcoin police Identify Their Targets
Blockchain addresses are public by design. If your wallet address has ever appeared in a forum post, a social media comment, or a transaction linked to a named exchange account, anyone with basic research skills can estimate your holdings without hacking a single system.
A screenshot of a portfolio balance posted to celebrate a bull run. A conference lanyard photographed next to a hardware wallet. A delivery app account was compromised in a data breach that revealed your home address. These are not careless mistakes. They are reconnaissance opportunities.
The Ledger customer data breach, which exposed the names, phone numbers, and home addresses of over 270,000 customers, demonstrated exactly how offline data enables physical targeting.
🚨 ALERT: ZachXBT flags a Ledger data breach linked to Global-e, impacting customer names and contact info. pic.twitter.com/ObzSfCVjtC
— Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) January 5, 2026
Fake Bitcoin Police cross-reference this kind of leaked data with social media profiles, tax document screenshots, and public blockchain explorers. By the time someone arrives at your door, they likely already know approximately what you hold and where you live. You are not being targeted at random. You are being targeted because a trail of digital breadcrumbs made you the most accessible option on a shortlist.
Do not publicly disclose that you hold significant crypto. This means no portfolio screenshots on social media, no crypto-branded clothing at public events, no forum posts linking your username to a wallet address. You cannot be targeted for what attackers do not know you have.
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Bitcoin Hyper More Secure and Faster
Bitcoin has the best security, but it’s not the fastest chain to transfer your wealth when a wrench attack happens to you. Bitcoin Hyper fixes this. It’s the first-ever Bitcoin Layer 2 with Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) integration, bringing fast, programmable smart contracts to Bitcoin without sacrificing the network’s legendary security.
The Bitcoin we all love. 💛
In its HYPER era. 🔥⚡️https://t.co/VNG0P4GuDo pic.twitter.com/WYkTAwEieR
— Bitcoin Hyper (@BTC_Hyper2) April 8, 2026
The pitch is direct: Bitcoin’s $1.7 trillion in locked value has always been constrained by slow transactions, high fees, and no programmability. Bitcoin Hyper is built to remove all three constraints simultaneously.
The presale numbers are concrete. The current price is still at a low $0.0136, with $32 million raised so far. Staking is live with a high APY of 36%. The project also features a Decentralized Canonical Bridge for BTC transfers and extremely low-latency transaction execution.
Research Bitcoin Hyper and become an army today.
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