One Crypto Kidnapping Every 2.5 Days: France Promises New Measures
France is preparing new protections for crypto holders as wrench attacks and ransom kidnappings continue to climb. Minister delegate Jean-Didier Berger announced the plan at Paris Blockchain Week, days after another mother-and-child abduction made headlines.
Quick Insights
- Jean-Didier Berger, minister delegate to France's interior minister, says new measures to protect crypto holders are coming within weeks.
- France has logged 41 crypto-linked kidnappings since January 2026, one every 2.5 days on average, according to French broadcaster RTL.
- CertiK recorded 19 wrench attacks in France during 2025, more than any other country, as Europe became the most dangerous region for crypto holders.
France is preparing new measures to protect crypto holders from the wave of physical attacks and ransom kidnappings sweeping the country. Jean-Didier Berger, the minister delegate to interior minister Laurent Nunez, made the announcement at Paris Blockchain Week on Wednesday. He said his office is working with Nunez on what he described as a more serious plan due in the coming weeks.
Berger said a prevention platform launched earlier in the year has already drawn thousands of sign-ups. The new plan is expected to go further. It comes as French crypto entrepreneurs and their families face what CertiK has called a structural threat to digital asset ownership.
A Ransom Case in Burgundy Set the Stage
The timing was not accidental. On Monday, a mother and her 11-year-old son were abducted in Burgundy by four suspects demanding a 400,000 euro ($471,000) ransom from the father, a crypto entrepreneur. Police arrested the suspects and freed the victims on Tuesday morning, the Paris prosecutor's office confirmed to French broadcaster France24.
It was the latest in a string of crypto-linked abductions that has put France at the centre of a global crime wave. French broadcaster RTL reported 41 such kidnappings in the country since the start of 2026, averaging one every 2.5 days. That figure builds on a record 2025, when France logged more wrench attacks than any other country in the world.
France Accounted for Most Wrench Attacks Globally in 2025
CertiK's Skynet Wrench Attacks Report, published in February, documented a 75% jump in verified attacks between 2024 and 2025. Physical assaults specifically rose 250%. Europe accounted for over 40% of global incidents, up from 22% a year earlier, and France drove most of that increase with 19 confirmed cases against eight in the United States.
The report flagged a clear pattern. Attackers are organised, often transnational, and use open-source intelligence to identify targets before moving on their homes or families. Technical security no longer matters when the attack vector is a wrench, a kidnapping, or a home invasion.
Ledger Co-Founder, a Magistrate, and a $1 Million Bitcoin Robbery
The 2026 incidents follow several high-profile attacks from 2025. In January of last year, attackers kidnapped Ledger co-founder David Balland and his wife Amandine from their home in Mereau. They severed one of Balland's fingers and demanded a 10 million euro ransom in crypto from his business partner. French police rescued the couple within 48 hours and eventually traced the network to Morocco.
In February 2026, French police arrested six people over the kidnapping of a magistrate and her mother in a crypto-linked ransom attack targeting the magistrate's partner, a crypto entrepreneur. In March, a French couple in their late fifties were robbed of $1 million worth of Bitcoin by criminals posing as police officers during a home invasion.
"What was once treated as an edge-case risk has become a structural threat to digital asset ownership. Attackers are no longer acting opportunistically. They are operating as organised, transnational groups."
Why Holders Are Now a Target
The underlying problem is visibility. Public social media footprints, leaked databases, and on-chain analysis make it possible to identify likely high-value holders from outside the country. In June 2025, French prosecutors charged a tax official with abusing access to government databases to identify crypto investors and allegedly passing details to organised crime groups.
Founders and early adopters have started scrubbing digital footprints, pulling out of public events, or moving to lower-risk jurisdictions. That behavioural shift is now showing up in CertiK's data and industry conversations, though many holders still underestimate the risk. Nobody buys crypto thinking their physical security will become part of the threat model.
Security researchers recommend a few consistent practices: keep holdings off public social media, use multisig wallets so no single device or seed grants full access, avoid patterns that make home addresses easy to infer, consider decoy wallets with small balances, and treat any face-to-face trade with a stranger as a high-risk event. None of this eliminates the threat. It raises the cost of targeting you specifically.
What France's New Measures Might Look Like
Berger has not disclosed the specifics of the coming plan. Based on what French officials have already put in place and what Berger said on stage, the measures are likely to build on the existing prevention platform. That could mean stronger data protections for crypto investors, more resources for dedicated police units, and possibly industry obligations around KYC data handling after the June 2025 insider-leak case.
Interior minister Nunez convened crypto industry professionals in May 2025 after an earlier wave of attempted abductions. The upcoming announcement appears to be the formalisation of that dialogue. Whether any new regulation reaches Parliament quickly enough to slow the current pace of attacks is a different question. At one kidnapping every 2.5 days, the gap between policy and street-level crime is wide.