French crypto chiefs step up security after string of violent kidnappings

By Aurelien Breeden, Catherine Porter & Liz Alderman 

A man, beaten and doused in gasoline, was found in the trunk of a car. A couple were abducted before dawn from their countryside house and sped to separate locations. A woman was attacked in broad daylight on a Paris street by men trying to drag her into a van.

 

Over the past six months in France, these violent, headline-grabbing kidnappings or attempted kidnappings, followed by demands for hefty ransoms, had one common thread: All targeted people with ties to the cryptocurrency world — in most cases, family members of crypto entrepreneurs or influencers.

 

While the growing popularity of cryptocurrencies has enticed criminals around the globe — including in the United States — the spree of recent attacks in France has shocked many by their brazenness, brutality and copycat nature. In two instances, the kidnappers cut off a victim’s finger to scare families and colleagues into paying millions of euros in ransom, the authorities said — and in one of those cases, they threatened to drill into the victim’s knee, according to France’s interior minister.

 

The kidnappings were ultimately thwarted by the police or bystanders. The Paris police said 24 people were taken into custody on Monday and Tuesday in connection with the attempted kidnapping of a cryptocurrency entrepreneur’s daughter in Paris, which was captured in a disturbing video.

 

As alarm spreads through France’s burgeoning crypto industry, big players are saying that new European cryptocurrency regulations may be giving hackers access to sensitive personal data to track their targets. They are pushing the government to make the rules safer — and stepping up their own personal security.

 

“Everyone is thinking about who is next,” said Owen Simonin, a French influencer and entrepreneur specialising in cryptocurrency who was startled in 2022 when a man arrived on his doorstep with a gun and demanded money.

 

 Simonin was not harmed. But in the aftermath he wiped personal information off the internet, added secure doors and cameras at his home and hired security guards. Now, he said, he tries to walk on the side of the street where cars are parked to make it harder for kidnappers to pull up and grab him.

 

This month, after a meeting with crypto executives under tight security, Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau announced new measures to protect them, including special access to emergency services, security training with elite police forces and a safety audit of their homes. French officials did not comment for this article on whether cryptocurrency regulations needed to be adjusted. Among other things, the rules require crypto entrepreneurs to register their personal address in public databases, as well as the identities of most people involved in crypto transactions.

 

Some top executives have sharply upgraded their physical security, including Éric Larchevêque, a founder of Ledger, a prominent company that sells physical devices to store crypto assets. He told RTL radio this month that it cost 50,000 to 100,000 euros (about $57,000 to $113,000) per month for personal security for executives like him and their families.

 

 Retailleau said he was determined to stop the attacks, which he likened to bank and jeweler heists of past eras. The difference today, he told reporters, is that old-school ransomers wanted physical cash handed to them, giving the police opportunities for arrests.

 

Now, he said, “it’s completely dematerialised.”

 

The attacks have fed into a broader wave of concern in France that violence tied to organized crime — especially drug trafficking — is spiraling out of control.

 

The authorities and experts say the attacks are part of a growing trend in organized crime, with fewer established, hierarchical groups and more small teams of violent criminals who do not know one another and who are hired for specific tasks by distant bosses — a gig economy of crime seen in drug trafficking, burglaries and, now, ransom-motivated kidnappings.

 

“We are seeing more and more young criminals, members of the drug trade, recruited on a contract basis,” Fabrice Gardon, the head of the Paris judicial police, told BFMTV this month.

 

In January, David Balland, the co-founder of Ledger, was abducted alongside his wife from their home in central France. The couple were held for ransom over two days —  Balland’s finger was cut off — until the police found and freed them. This month, two kidnappings in Paris, France’s capital, shocked the country even further.

 

Experts say the uptick in kidnappings is partly because of the rising value of currencies like Bitcoin and because of a broader societal awareness of the crypto industry. About 12 percent of people in France own cryptocurrencies, according to a recent study by the audit company KPMG and the Ipsos polling institute.

 

Then, witnesses on a busy Paris street watched in shock as three men attacked the daughter of Pierre Noizat, the chief executive of Paymium, a French cryptocurrency exchange platform, and tried to force her, screaming, into the back of a van. Her partner and a bystander repelled the attackers, who fled.

 

“These images went around the world,” said Stanislas Bartholemi, the president of ADAN, a business group that represents France’s crypto industry. “People in the crypto community are saying, ‘Did you see what happened in France?’”

 

Experts say the uptick in kidnappings is partly because of the rising value of currencies like Bitcoin and because of a broader societal awareness of the crypto industry. About 12 percent of people in France own cryptocurrencies, according to a recent study by the audit company KPMG and the Ipsos polling institute.

 

Gardon, the police official, said that criminals were targeting cryptocurrencies because they considered them easy targets — less protected than a bank vault, faster to transfer than bags of cash and easier to launder by bouncing the money from account to account, including abroad.

 

But some experts say that this is partly a misperception, and that crypto transfers have become increasingly secure — sometimes requiring multiple people to sign off on a single transaction — and in some cases are easier for the authorities to trace and freeze.

 

“The bottom line is that very little money was stolen, apart from residual amounts,” said Renaud Lifchitz, a cybersecurity consultant and cryptocurrency expert. In Mr. Balland’s case, part of the ransom was paid, but the authorities were able to freeze and seize almost all of it.

 

More problematic, Mr. Lifchitz said, was that the kidnappers were able to identify and locate their targets. While it is not yet clear how they did so, he said that data breaches tied to large hacks of companies or government institutions were increasingly common.

 

“There are a lot of French people whose data is exposed,” he said — including people with ties to the cryptocurrency world.

 

One of the biggest concerns is that Europe-wide cryptocurrency regulations require a level of transparency that leaves a digital trail that criminals can exploit to stake out victims, either physically or online, said Mr. Bartholemi, the head of the French crypto business lobby group.

 

Some the data required to be reported are intended to thwart money laundering. But after the kidnappings, French entrepreneurs asked regulators to consider rewriting some of the data privacy rules to make them safer.

 

“If we want to protect ourselves, we are going to be discreet and anonymous,” said Alexandre Stachchenko, the director of strategy at Paymium. “But when we want to be discrete and anonymous, the law tells us it’s criminal. So what do we do?”