Alena Vranova, founding father of SatoshiLabs, warned of the rise in wrench assaults, bodily assaults and abductions carried out in opposition to Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto holders in an try to steal their non-public keys.
“Each week, there’s a Bitcoiner, at the very least one on this planet, who will get kidnapped, tortured, extorted, and typically even worse,” Vranova told the viewers on the Baltic Honeybadger 2025 convention in Riga, Latvia.
She warned that even small crypto buyers might be on the radar of violent criminals in search of a goal. She added:
“What appears to be an issue just for Bitcoin OGs is just not actually the case. We now have seen instances of kidnappings for as little as $6,000 value of crypto, and we now have seen folks murdered for $50,000 in crypto.”
The rise in wrench attacks against crypto holders is a disturbing development, with bodily assaults in opposition to Bitcoiners in 2025 on observe to double the worst year on record, prompting personal safety countermeasures from buyers, builders, and business executives.
Associated: Wrench attacks drive crypto investors to centralized custodians
Centralized knowledge leaks enlarge the wrench assault menace
Knowledge leaks from centralized crypto exchanges, which accumulate delicate consumer data underneath know-your-customer (KYC) necessities, and different centralized software program suppliers who accumulate shopper knowledge, permit violent criminals to focus on crypto holders and their households.
“We at the moment have greater than 80 million Bitcoiner and crypto consumer identities leaked on-line; 2.2 million out of these comprise house addresses,” Vranova stated.
These assaults are correlated with Bitcoin costs, and the frequency of the assaults rises throughout bull markets, she added.
In Could, crypto alternate Coinbase disclosed an information breach that leaked the information of a small subset of Coinbase prospects, which included house addresses and different figuring out data.
In June, a report from Cybernews uncovered databases containing greater than 16 billion leaked consumer login credentials from platforms like Apple, Fb, and Google.
The password leak negatively impacts crypto holders, who will now be topic to elevated phishing, social engineering, hacking, id theft, and different sorts of focused scams designed to steal consumer knowledge and funds.
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