As celebrity Twitch streamer Kaitlyn Siragusa (better known as Amouranth) slept at her home in Houston, three men broke in and pistol-whipped her, demanding she hand over her cryptocurrency.
The March 2 incident is just one in a recent string that has prompted authorities to warn investors in cryptocurrency and people owning large amounts of digital assets about their vulnerability to kidnapping and robbery.
Elsewhere, a kidnapping attempt was caught on camera and broadcast by Le Parisien media outlet. It showed footage from a May 13 attempt to abduct the relatives—a 34-year-old woman and her 2-year-old daughter—of a cryptocurrency investor.
Lopp said he believes several people have been targeted because they flaunted their crypto wealth on social media.
“Amouranth, for example, who was hit in Texas, she almost assuredly got hit because she posted a screenshot of her wallet that had $20 million worth of Bitcoin in it,” he said.
While most U.S. banks will ask customers to give prior notice before withdrawing large amounts from their accounts, this extra precaution is unavailable in the digital-asset space.
David McKelvey, a former detective chief inspector in London’s Metropolitan Police, who now runs an investigation company, TM Eye, said the flaw with digital assets is that once criminals have access details to a crypto wallet, they can take everything.
The advantage of cryptocurrency to many people is that it is decentralized, and they don’t have to rely on banks, said Michael Litman, innovation director at Digital Frontier in London.
But, he said, “there are pros and cons to decentralization.”
“When you get hacked, or when you get your wallet drained, there’s no comeback … you don’t have a technical support number, you don’t have a bank to call and say that something’s happened.”
Most Attacks Not Publicized
Kidnappings and other attempted extortion are known in the industry as “wrench attacks,” named after a cartoon in a comic called XKCD.The cartoon shows a “crypto nerd” imagining he would thwart any theft attempt with high-level encryption, only to be hit over the head with a $5 wrench and being forced to hand over the password.
“You can have a crazy level of mathematical security around your data, your private keys, whatever. But if we’re able to bypass it nearly instantaneously, then that’s a major weakness in your setup,” Lopp said.
Fabrice Gardon, the director of the judicial police, told radio station RTL that one of the victim’s fingers had been cut off during the ordeal. The victim is yet to be named. Seven people were arrested in connection with that incident.
It occurred four months after kidnappers mutilated the hand of David Balland, the co-founder of cryptocurrency firm Ledger, during a separate abduction and ransom incident.
In June 2024, a British crypto investor posted on social media—a post that has since been deleted—that he had been attacked by three men with machetes, who forced him to open his ledger and then transferred out all of his cryptocurrency.
In 2022, Aiden Pleterski, the self-proclaimed “Crypto King,” was kidnapped at gunpoint in downtown Toronto, beaten, and held captive for three days.
“These villains are shrewd, and there are some very, very professional gangs around, including South Americans, who will spend days carrying out surveillance, checking on someone’s lifestyle, putting trackers on their cars, and checking the location of CCTV cameras,” McKelvey said.
Lopp said it’s “fairly reasonable to assume that the vast majority of attacks are never publicized.”
“There are plenty of victims who never even contact law enforcement because they’re afraid that will just result in the attack getting into the public eye and making them a bigger target.”
Getting Caught
Having gained access to a cryptocurrency wallet—sometimes referred to as a ledger—a criminal can transfer the entire contents to their own digital wallet, leaving few clues about their identity.This aura of safety leads criminals to make mistakes, Lopp said, and “that’s good for law enforcement, because it helps them more easily track the people, hopefully, and find them.”
But, he said, few local police departments have the knowledge required to trace stolen cryptocurrency, and the expertise is often only found at a federal level.
“I’ve worked with the FBI on several instances, and I can tell you, just due to the resource constraints of national level law enforcement, they’re generally not going to go after [cryptocurrency] theft and attacks unless we’re talking millions of dollars or more,” Lopp said.
In early May, three teenagers were charged with stealing $4 million in cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in November 2024, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department confirmed to The Epoch Times.
Earlier this year, the cryptocurrency firm Bybit said hackers had stolen $1.5 billion worth of digital currency in what is thought to be the largest heist of its kind.
‘Low Risk, High Reward’ Crime
According to McKelvey, criminals tend to move towards “low risk, high reward” crimes, and just as they moved from armed robberies into drug smuggling in the 1980s and 1990s, now they are likely to gravitate towards cryptocurrency-related crimes.In recent years, Chinese organized crime has been involved in industrial-scale cyber scamming from hubs in Burma (also known as Myanmar), Cambodia, and Laos.
Michael Englander, the CEO of a Poland-based crypto exchange, Plasbit, advises people to invest in security to protect critical information.
Crypto wallets come in different forms. In recent years, “cold wallets” have become more popular because they are not connected to the internet and less prone to hacking, as opposed to online wallets, known as “hot wallets.”
“A cold wallet ... primarily protects you from hackers because your [password] keys are no longer on a general-purpose internet-connected device,” Lopp said.
He added that it still does not protect crypto investors from scams that rely on exploiting a person’s trust.
