Armed gangs are hunting crypto’s high rollers—NBC News tallies 67 bitcoin-linked kidnappings across 44 countries since 2019, with 2024 and 2025 both hitting decade highs.

NBC News reports that armed gangs are increasingly targeting people believed to hold large cryptocurrency fortunes, using kidnapping, home invasion, and torture-style coercion to force victims to transfer digital assets. Crisis24 says this pattern has expanded globally, with at least 231 physical incidents involving crypto holders in the past 18 months and $128 million of the $166 million stolen through physical attacks from 2022 to 2025 coming from kidnappings. The NBC story frames the issue as part of a broader rise in “wrench attacks,” in which criminals use violence rather than hacking to reach crypto wealth, taking advantage of the fact that blockchain transfers can be immediate and irreversible once a victim complies. NBC’s tally of 67 bitcoin-linked kidnappings across 44 countries since 2019, with 2024 and 2025 both reaching decade highs, shows that this is no longer an isolated crime trend but a persistent transnational security problem that now affects wealthy investors, founders, and sometimes ordinary users whose holdings become known. The story matters because it shifts the crypto crime conversation from online theft to physical personal danger, illustrating how digital wealth can create real-world vulnerability. It also suggests that law enforcement, personal security, and crypto custody practices are now converging around a new risk model in which public exposure of holdings can make people targets for organized crime.

✨ AI-generated background, compiled from web sources — not editorial content.

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