French Masked Men Take €40K From Crypto IT Dad While Kids Watch, Bound in Tape 🔓

Four hooded men broke into a family home in Vendin-le-Vieil, northern France, at around 4 a.m. on Sunday, bound a couple and their two children with black tape and forced the father to hand over €40,000 (about $46,000) in cryptocurrency before driving off, according to BFMTV and France Télévisions. The Béthune prosecutor's office said the father, 40, works as a salaried IT specialist in the digital currency sector. The perpetrators separated him from the rest of the family, assaulted him and made him "communicate his identification information and codes," a police source told France Télévisions. The children, aged eight and twelve, were among those detained; the twelve-year-old daughter was struck in the face with car keys, according to a source close to the investigation. Firefighters reached the house at 7 a.m. after the family worked itself free. Prosecutors described the victims as in a state of shock and referred them for forensic medical examination, with a victim support association assigned to the family.

The Béthune prosecutor's office has opened an investigation into kidnapping and extortion by an organized gang, a case now handled by regional judicial police together with France's anti-cybercrime office. All four suspects remain at large. The attack fits a pattern prosecutors in France have flagged repeatedly this year. The national anti-organised crime prosecutor's office has recorded more than 70 kidnappings and unlawful detentions linked to crypto in the first eight months of 2026, and authorities charged 88 people, some of them minors, in a crackdown earlier in the year. Previous high-profile French cases targeted the father of a crypto millionaire whose finger was severed, the wife of a Sandbox co-founder and the chief executive of Binance France; the Vendin-le-Vieil case differs in that the victim was a salaried IT specialist and the sum taken was in the low tens of thousands of euros.

Data from blockchain security firm CertiK shows the broader trend is escalating quickly. CertiK verified 52 "wrench attacks," incidents in which criminals use violence or threats to force victims to hand over crypto, in the first half of 2026, up a third from 39 a year earlier. Recorded financial exposure climbed almost 12-fold to $124.1 million from $10.5 million in H1 2025. Globally, Chainalysis counted $30 million taken in wrench attacks during 2026, while CertiK put losses at $124 million across six months, a twelvefold rise, according to figures cited in the report. France has emerged as the worst-affected country in the world for these attacks, a designation CertiK and French authorities have both used in recent statements.