At least 1 Bitcoiner gets kidnapped every week — Crypto exec

4 hours ago

Alena Vranova, laminitis of SatoshiLabs, warned of the summation successful wrench attacks, carnal assaults and abductions carried retired against Bitcoin (BTC) and crypto holders successful an effort to bargain their backstage keys.

“Every week, determination is simply a Bitcoiner, astatine slightest 1 successful the world, who gets kidnapped, tortured, extorted, and sometimes adjacent worse,” Vranova told the assemblage astatine the Baltic Honeybadger 2025 league successful Riga, Latvia.

She warned that adjacent tiny crypto investors tin beryllium connected the radar of convulsive criminals looking for a target. She added:

“What seems to beryllium a occupation lone for Bitcoin OGs is not truly the case. We person seen cases of kidnappings for arsenic small arsenic $6,000 worthy of crypto, and we person seen radical murdered for $50,000 successful crypto.”

The emergence successful wrench attacks against crypto holders is simply a disturbing trend, with carnal attacks against Bitcoiners successful 2025 connected way to double the worst twelvemonth connected record, prompting personal information countermeasures from investors, developers, and manufacture executives.

Centralized information leaks magnify the wrench onslaught threat

Data leaks from centralized crypto exchanges, which cod delicate idiosyncratic accusation nether know-your-customer (KYC) requirements, and different centralized bundle providers who cod lawsuit data, let convulsive criminals to people crypto holders and their families.

“We presently person much than 80 cardinal Bitcoiner and crypto idiosyncratic identities leaked online; 2.2 cardinal retired of those incorporate location addresses,” Vranova said.

These attacks are correlated with Bitcoin prices, and the frequence of the attacks rises during bull markets, she added.

In May, crypto speech Coinbase disclosed a information breach that leaked the information of a tiny subset of Coinbase customers, which included location addresses and different identifying information.

In June, a report from Cybernews uncovered databases containing much than 16 cardinal leaked idiosyncratic login credentials from platforms similar Apple, Facebook, and Google.

The password leak negatively impacts crypto holders, who volition present beryllium taxable to accrued phishing, societal engineering, hacking, individuality theft, and different types of targeted scams designed to bargain idiosyncratic information and funds.

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