Bitcoin's Nouveau Riche Executives And Wealthy Investors In Search Of Ways To Protect Themselves

Six Crypto Deaths That Haunt the Blockchain World. Bitcoin’s Nouveau Riche Executives And Wealthy Investors In Search Of Ways To Protect Themselves

Mysterious crypto deaths are becoming part and parcel of the blockchain industry. It seems that as Bitcoin (BTC) and other digital currencies grow in popularity, the number of unexplained crypto billionaire deaths only becomes more common.

Whether it’s a simple petty crime or far-flung conspiracy theories involving the CIA, crypto killings have left a trail of fear throughout the blockchain community.

Why is the crypto space such a hotbed for suspicious deaths, and who are some of the industry’s most infamous victims?

Crypto’s allure is undeniable. With thousands of rags-to-riches stories promising anyone they can become an overnight millionaire, it’s unsurprising that it attracts some desperate characters.

On top of that, it’s widely believed that organized crime groups use blockchain to transfer funds and value due to blockchain’s anonymous and decentralized nature. Crypto’s decentralized ethos means many users operate outside traditional systems and often sport anti-establishment and anti-authority beliefs.

Sometimes, investors might find themselves on the wrong end of a diabolical scam or failed business. Revenge crime is common, with supposed ‘Crypto Kings’ like Aiden Pleterski getting kidnapped and forced to apologize after scamming dozens of ‘investors.’

High-profile individuals in the crypto space often control vast amounts of wealth, sometimes in very liquid and easily transferable forms. This makes them prime targets for both digital and real-world threats.

Breaking into a central bank is hard, but following someone home and forcing them to hand over their private keys is much easier.

Behind the glitz and glamour of soaring coin prices and revolutionary tech breakthroughs, the crypto world has its fair share of horror stories. Let’s explore some of the most dramatic and suspicious deaths in crypto.

Nikolai Mushegian was a beloved figure in the early DeFi space. He was an early contributor to the MakerDAO, DAI, and Balancer ecosystems and championed cryptocurrency and decentralization.

One month before his death, Nikolai Mushegian speculated that his future had three eventualities. He anticipated either being “suicided by the CIA, CIA brain damage slave asset, or the worst nightmare’ of his adversaries.

In October 2022, Mushegian’s story took a dark turn. The savvy DeFi developer must’ve made some powerful enemies somewhere along the way. He tweeted that the CIA and Mossad (Israeli Intelligence Agency) wanted him dead and would torture and frame him using a spy posing as his girlfriend.

Just a few hours after the tweet was posted, Mushegian’s body washed up, fully clothed, in the waters of Puerto Rico. Unsurprisingly, the crypto community found this sudden loss shockingly suspicious.

Nikolai could’ve died any day of the year. It seems strange that he was found dead mere hours after saying he was a target.

Despite this, San Juan Police claims no evidence of foul play existed. Mainstream news outlets like the New York Post also declared that Mushegian was paranoid, discrediting his severe claims and accusations.

Tiantian Kullander was an ambitious and accomplished financial player in the crypto space. Boasting former stints at industry giants like Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, Kullander was making his mark as the co-founder of the Amber Group, a Hong Kong-based digital asset startup.

Unlike Nikolai Mushegian, Kullander kept a relatively low profile and led a private life. In the eyes of the public, he hadn’t made any powerful or violent enemies that might have wanted him dead. Yet, the circumstances of his passing are certainly mysterious.

In November 2022, just weeks after Mushegian was found dead, Kullander died in his sleep. At 30 years old, Tiantian was young, spritely, and in perfect health, making his unexpected death even more suspicious.

Activists used the abrupt death as ammunition in their war against vaccinations, although no medical diagnosis supported this. In fact, to this day, all reports say that the fintech entrepreneur died in his sleep.

What would any list of mysterious deaths be without an eccentric Russian billionaire? Founder of the Forex Club Group and President of the Libertex Group, Vyacheslav Taran, was an affluent and powerful member of the global financial circuit and crypto industry.

Of course, Taran had his enemies. Whispered rumors out of Ukrainian media hinted that Taran was a money launderer with links to the Russian Oligarchy and used cryptocurrency to transfer funds illegally.

Despite the claims, no proof or evidence ever emerged. The circumstances of Taran’s death were remarkably ordinary. In November 2022, Taran boarded a helicopter in Lausanne, Switzerland, and began the journey to his home in Monaco.

For reasons unknown, the helicopter went down over Villefranche-sur-mer in France in perfect flying conditions. Adding a layer of intrigue, Taran was meant to be joined by another VIP on the journey before the extra passenger canceled at the last minute on the same day of the helicopter crash.

Unfortunately for Fernando Pérez Algaba, there’s no way of passing his death off as a tragic accident. The popular Latin American crypto influencer and social media personality met a brutal end at the age of 41 when two children found his body dismembered and stuffed in a suitcase in Argentina.

Like most crypto characters on social media, Algaba presented a luxurious life of excess packed with fast cars, shiny watches, and glorious houses. He painted himself as a rags-to-riches hero who went from selling sandwiches at 14 to becoming a successful businessman and entrepreneur in the crypto market.

A local Argentinian news outlet, El Pais, had other ideas. Apparently, Algaba was riddled with debt and was hounded by Argentinian regulators. One of his companies, Motors Lettuce SRL, was in hot water financially, and he was struggling after losing a significant amount of money in another crypto venture.

On top of all that, Algaba was closely linked to the son of a Boca Juniors barra brava leader, or football gang. Before his death, Algaba allegedly mentioned that the group had asked him for loans and that the social media star feared for his safety.

Alongside the disastrous FTX collapse, November 2022 claims yet another victim. Javier Biosca was a Spanish crypto mogul known to authorities for his involvement in a litany of cryptocurrency scams.

Biosca found himself on the wrong side of Russian, Bulgarian, and Romanian mobsters living in southern Spain. Posing as an expert cryptocurrency investment firm, Biosca stole tens of thousands of dollars from investors to fund a lavish and luxurious lifestyle.

Local police eventually caught up with Biosca, imprisoning him for eight months. However, his sentence was cut short when an unknown benefactor paid his $1M bail. A few months later, Javier Biosca apparently threw himself off the fifth-floor balcony of a hotel in Estepona, Spain.

Gerald Cotten was the CEO and founder of QuadrigaCX, a Canadian crypto exchange and trading platform. Unfortunately, Cotten met his demise during his honeymoon in India.

The doctors overseeing his treatment pinned the cause of death to a perforated bowel resulting from his long-standing battle with Crohn’s Disease.

Adding an air of enigma, Cotten had a closed-coffin funeral with no post-mortem, leading some conspiracy theorists to question whether the crypto millionaire is truly dead at all. Some say Cotten faked his death as part of an elaborate exit scam.

Gerald was the only person with access to all the funds locked in the QuadrigaCX cryptocurrency exchange. When he passed away under mysterious circumstances, all QuadrigaCX customers lost their funds. The saga has become a popular Netflix documentary:.

While all these crypto deaths are undeniably mysterious and suspicious, there’s no hard concrete evidence to suggest any foul play for most of the victims.

Even if most of these deaths are simple coincidences, lessons remain to be learned. Don’t flaunt your wealth, don’t scam anyone, don’t do anything illegal, and don’t make yourself an enemy of mobsters and gangs; you should be fine.

The teenage trio allegedly told the victim they “had his dad and would kill him” if he didn’t fork over the passwords to his accounts.

Three teenagers have been accused of kidnapping a man at gunpoint after he was returning from a crypto event in Las Vegas, before driving him an hour outside of the city and robbing him of $4 million in crypto and non-fungible tokens.

According to police, the incident occurred last November. The victim had finished hosting a crypto-related event in downtown Las Vegas, and when he returned home, the suspects forced him into a vehicle and drove him to a remote desert area an hour away from the city.

There, they forced him to hand over passwords to his accounts, according to a May 10 report from Las Vegas local news outlet 8 News Now.

The man was allegedly told to comply with the teens’ demands if he wanted to “live to see another day,” and because they also “had his dad and would kill him,” according to the report.

It’s also alleged that a fourth person may have been communicating with the three young men through a phone call during the incident, which the victim could hear through a speakerphone.

After having his accounts drained of $4 million in crypto and NFTs, the victim reportedly walked five miles back through the desert to reach a gas station where he could call a friend for help.

Two 16-year-olds from Florida are facing charges including robbery, kidnapping, and extortion in connection with the incident. A third teen allegedly involved in the plot has left the country, prosecutors say.

One of the young men is behind bars with bail set at $4 million, while the other has been released under house arrest with electronic monitoring. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for June, with both teens set to be tried as adults.

Digital asset lawyer Sasha Hodder said in a May 10 X post that this case illustrates how “Crypto theft is evolving. It’s not just social engineering or SIM swaps anymore.”

Crypto industry participants are increasingly becoming targets for kidnappings and extortion. In a recent May 3 case, the father of a crypto entrepreneur was freed by police in Paris, France, after being held for several days in connection with a 7 million euro ($7.8 million) kidnapping plot.

In February, a UK crypto broker reportedly jumped 30 feet from a balcony to escape kidnappers who were threatening to torture and kill him if he didn’t hand over 30,000 euros ($30,917) of crypto.

Meanwhile, , a cypherpunk and co-founder of self-custodial firm Casa, has created a on GitHub recording dozens of offline crypto robberies all over the world.

The first dates back to 2014, when someone allegedly tried to extort computer scientist and cryptographer Hal Finney of 1,000 Bitcoinworth $400,000 at the time.

There have been 21 incidents of in-person crypto-related robbery so far this year, according to Lopp’s list. In 2024, there were 28 incidents, while there were 17 in 2023 and 32 in 2021.

France’s interior minister gathered crypto executives Friday to try to assuage their fears after a wave of kidnapping attempts targeting individuals connected to the digital asset sector hit the country.

French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau laid out a few immediate steps to respond to the threat in a statement on Friday. These include security checkups carried out by law enforcement at the homes of crypto executives as well as special briefings to them and their families provided by elite police tactical units.

He also plans to set up a priority emergency police number for the sector.

Retailleau is determined “to put an end to these unbearable attacks targeting cryptoasset professionals, just as they might have targeted banks and jewelry stores previously,” he said in the statement.

The meeting comes after the daughter and the grandson of the chief executive officer of crypto exchange Paymium were targeted this week in a failed attempt that took place in broad daylight in Paris.

Just weeks earlier, the father of a man whose wealth stems from cryptocurrencies was abducted in Paris, and then freed two days later.

While crypto-related kidnappings are not exclusive to France, the sudden surge of cases in the country has put executives on edge. In recent years, France’s crypto sector has grown into one of Europe’s most vibrant, bolstered by a supportive government and some homegrown successes.

This includes Paris-based Ledger, a global leader in crypto hardware wallets which was valued at €1.3 billion ($1.5 billion) in its latest round.

Retailleau will set up a working group to work with the crypto sector on the matter, he said. The minister wants to improve techniques to trace assets and come up with crypto-specific best practices. Law enforcement will also get further briefed on the topic of crypto laundering, he added.

France’s crypto world was deeply shaken in January when David Balland, one of the co-founders of Ledger, and his partner were taken at their home.

The pair were eventually released after the two-day incident, during which the group mutilated Balland’s hand to request a cryptocurrency ransom — some of which was paid and subsequently mostly frozen and seized.

Another co-founder of Ledger, Eric Larchevêque, who received the ransom demand, spoke at the time of his surprise and terror. After Tuesday’s Paymium kidnapping attempt, he further expressed concern on X about criminals with “no limits”.

“Nowadays, being successful in France, whether in the field of cryptoassets or elsewhere, means having a target on your back,” Larchevêque said in his post.

“And what are we told? That we should have been discreet. That we should have hidden. That we had it coming.”

In a statement issued ahead of the Retailleau meeting, Paymium urged French authorities to set up “measures to reinforce the protection those working at companies in the cryptocurrency ecosystem.”

At least two other crypto-related incidents in France have been reported on in recent months. Newspaper Le Parisien wrote about a failed attempt targeting a tax consultant near Dijon to get access to his wallet and, on New Year’s Eve, the father of a crypto influencer was kidnapped near the Swiss border before being rescued by police some two days later.

Several other incidents have been reported around the world in recent months from Belgium to Estonia to Canada, as well as Malaysia and Hong Kong.

As bitcoin soars, investors and executives are taking their swollen digital wallets offline for safety. Criminals are coming after them, violently.

—The screams echoed down the narrow street in a trendy neighborhood here early Tuesday morning: “Help! Help! Help!”

Three men in black masks had jumped on a 34-year-old woman whose father runs Paymium, a French cryptocurrency exchange. Brandishing canisters of mace and what looked like a gun, the masked men attempted to force the woman and her toddler into an idling white van disguised as a delivery truck.

But her husband threw himself between his family and the attackers, while a neighbor hustled away their child. “Let go of me!” the woman yelled as the assailants bludgeoned the husband, his head seen spattered with blood in videos taken from nearby buildings.

With other neighbors closing in, and a shopkeeper readying to throw a fire extinguisher, the would-be abductors jumped in the back of their van and sped off.

The brazen attack was the latest in a wave of violent abductions around the world, including several in the U.S., targeting crypto executives and their families. Victims have been pistol whipped, abducted, and—in two cases—had fingers severed.

The criminals’ goal: millions of dollars in ransom in cryptocurrency.

The assaults are often called “wrench attacks” because they rely on simple tools for inflicting pain to coerce victims, rather than sophisticated tools for hacking them.

Hacking has long been the primary risk for the crypto rich. But to thwart hackers, savvy cryptocurrency investors have increasingly taken their digital wallets offline in favor of physical devices, making remote theft more difficult. Real-world crypto crime bypasses those safeguards.

“A lot of people are getting to the hide-your-gold-under-the-mattress level of security,” said Jameson Lopp, the co-founder of bitcoin security company Casa. “But if you are a high-profile person…that’s when you have to worry about the physical attack.”

Those concerns intensified this week with cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase disclosing that as many as 97,000 customers have had their personal information stolen, including addresses and balance snapshots.

The company said the data was likely stolen by bribed contractors or employees working in customer support, and that it had refused a $20 million ransom demand.

Another factor motivating criminals: Cryptocurrencies have surged in value, with bitcoin up 54% in the last year, minting a whole new array of potential deep-pocketed targets.

At least five crypto-related abductions have taken place in France in recent months, and there have been dozens of other recorded cases around the world in the last year, according to government officials and specialists in the sector.

An Australian crypto billionaire narrowly escaped abduction in Estonia last July, local media reported, by fighting off attackers posing as painters.

And in March a Houston crypto influencer was assaulted before her husband got in a shootout with robbers who invaded their home in the middle of the night demanding her laptop.

Some of the assaults have been clumsy, with the criminals quickly caught. But there are signs that organized-crime rings see major profit potential.

“The criminal element is poking around trying to find out what is the [return on investment] on these wrench attacks,” Lopp said.

In September, a Florida man was sentenced to 47 years in prison for leading a ring that carried out a string of home-invasions across multiple states in search of crypto riches. In one of the attacks, the man held a pink revolver to the head of a 76-year-old Durham, N.C. man and threatened to cut off his genitals.

The victim eventually transferred $150,000 worth of crypto to the attacker, who was later ordered to pay more than $500,000 in restitution to his victims as part of the sentencing.

On Friday morning, French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau gathered leaders of crypto companies for a meeting to present new security measures for the sector.

Retailleau said Tuesday’s attack appears similar to other recent abductions in France, in which officials say ringleaders recruited young criminals they never met using apps like Telegram and Signal and then “remote controlled” them to execute their plan.

“It’s probable that these cases are linked,” Retailleau said in a televised interview.

So far, most of the victims of reported wrench attacks have been tied to prominent names, either known for working in the crypto sector or for flaunting their wealth online.

Killian Desnos, an online gambling influencer under the name Teufeurs—which means “partier” in French—was well-known for his YouTube and Twitch streams when prosecutors say a person posing as an Amazon delivery driver rang his father’s doorbell in a small town in northwestern France in August 2023.

That person and an accomplice forced the father into a vehicle—and soon sent Desnos a ransom-demand video of his father, bound, with a gun to his head. Desnos, who was based in Malta, alerted the police but also paid the ransom, prosecutors said.

His father was recovered the following day. Police soon arrested two people, who face kidnapping charges.

“Flexing on the internet wasn’t a good idea—I realize that now,” Desnos wrote on X at the time.

A major question now is how criminals are finding their targets in the real world—and what to do about it.

Already, members of the crypto community say they are turning their Instagram profiles private and are trying to remove their physical addresses, and those of their families, from public records.

One executive said he is particularly worried because he has a young child. Following Tuesday’s attack, Paymium urged authorities to lessen disclosure obligations that the company argues could put customers at risk in the event of a data leak.

In addition to the Coinbase hack, two data leaks in particular have investigators worried. The first was the July 2020 hack of Ledger, a French crypto-wallet company that makes sleek physical devices that keep the keys to your cryptocurrency offline.

In that hack, which accessed Ledger’s marketing database, the names, email and postal addresses of 272,000 customers were eventually dumped online.

The second was a breach of risk advisory company Kroll, which gave hackers access to addresses and other personal information belonging to creditors in the bankruptcy proceedings of the cryptocurrency company Genesis.

Data from both of these hacks has been made available in criminal forums, cybersecurity investigators say.

Others point out that a vast amount of personal data has been stolen and dumped in the past decade. In France, in particular, public incorporation records can include entrepreneurs’ home addresses.

Cybercriminals have become adept at figuring out their victim’s home address by cross-referencing databases and even using paid sources of information, said Taylor Monahan, a security researcher at cryptocurrency wallet company MetaMask.

This information is often made public in order to threaten and de-anonymize their victims, a form of online attack known as doxxing.

“The younger generation is just very internet savvy and they’re very good at doxxing people,” she said.

Some Ledger users have already complained that the hack exposed them to extortion and threats. In early 2021, Naeem Seirafi, a cinematographer based in Los Angeles, started to receive phishing emails and text messages asking him to enter his Ledger account information to verify new deposits, or prevent a bug from wiping out his assets.

Next, someone sent him a message asking for a ransom of 0.3 bitcoin, then worth about $10,000, to prevent an attack on his home. “You also happen to keep quite a lot of crypto,” the person texted him. “I’m going to share all that information (and more) with local area bad guys in your area.”

The threat was carried out, when his home was “swatted” while he was away but his parents were inside. The local police department received a 911 call from a person who claimed he had just shot a friend at Seirafi’s address, according to a police report.

Almost a dozen officers swarmed Seirafi’s home. After clearing the property, police confirmed it was a hoax.

Seirafi later joined a class-action lawsuit seeking damages from Ledger that was filed in a district court in California. “To the world of hackers, Ledger’s customer list is a gold mine,” their complaint said.

A lawyer representing the class-action claim declined to comment. Ledger has argued to the court that Seirafi wasn’t harmed by the hack because he hadn’t lost any money. A spokesman declined to comment further.

David Balland is one of the co-founders of Ledger. No longer involved directly in the company, he lives with his partner near Vierzon, in central France—where French officials say they were abducted at gunpoint before dawn one Tuesday in January.

Within hours, other Ledger co-founders, including Éric Larchevêque, heard from the ringleader demanding ransom of 10 million euros—messages they knew were authentic because of the T-shirt David was wearing, people familiar with the case said.

One message included a video of the abductors chopping off one of Balland’s fingers.

Police negotiators sat with Larchevêque while he communicated with the hostage takers. The negotiators tried to stall, authorizing an initial ransom payment of more than a million euros, while investigators scoured for clues to where Balland and his partner were being held.

“It was a race against time,” Laure Beccuau, the Paris prosecutor, later said in a televised interview. “It was about liberating these two hostages, it was about saving their lives.”

The police eventually tracked the kidnappers to a rental house surrounded by farmland some 40 minutes drive south of where the couple was grabbed. The police raided the house and freed Balland—but his partner wasn’t there.

“We were convinced that they would actually be together. And well, when we realized that they were separated, that was really, really complicated,” said Nicolas Bacca, another Ledger co-founder.

Balland’s partner wasn’t found until the next day, in the back of a stolen van an hour and a half north, after another ransom had been paid.

Fortunately, the ringleader had asked to be paid in a dollar-pegged cryptocurrency called tether that is possible to freeze. Since the Ledger co-founders put in place a plan to do that as soon as the hostages were freed, they were able to claw back roughly 80% of the 3 million euro ransom they’d paid, and more in subsequent days, people familiar with the case said.

“We’ve lived through unimaginable violence,” Balland said in a social-media post asking for privacy for his family. He temporarily changed his profile description on X to read, “Fingers: 9/10,” according to a screenshot from the time.

It’s unclear how the attackers found Balland. His home address wasn’t leaked in the Ledger hack, a person familiar with the breach said.

Prosecutors in April filed preliminary charges against a man who people familiar with the case said was already being held in jail for charges related to the 2023 kidnapping of Desnos’s father, and who allegedly had helped organize Balland’s abduction while incarcerated.

Investigators are still probing whether he was working for another boss, one of the people said.

Earlier this month, the father of another Malta-based crypto entrepreneur was abducted while he was walking his dog in Paris. One ransom demand showed the father getting a finger chopped off. Several people were arrested in that attack, all between the ages of 18 and 26, according to prosecutors.

Officials had to wait barely two weeks for another example to study.

On Tuesday, the Paymium CEO’s daughter only escaped by fighting back along with her husband, according to police, who said the gun brandished at the scene turned out to be a toy.

“They’re doing as well as can be expected,” Paymium CEO Pierre Noizat said of his daughter and son-in-law, whom he called a hero, in a televised interview on Friday morning. “He has a few stitches.”

Noizat and others involved in prior attacks say the crime wave is shaking their faith in France’s ability to control criminal gangs and drug dealers.

Writing on X this week, Ledger co-founder Larchevêque decried what he called the “Mexicanization” of the country. “How many entrepreneurs, how many talented individuals, are seriously considering leaving a country that no longer protects its people?”

French law enforcement will offer crypto entrepreneurs and their families a police emergency line and conduct house visits to ensure their safety amid a recent spate of attacks.

Crypto entrepreneurs and their families in France will receive enhanced security measures amid a recent rise in crypto-related kidnappings in the country, Politico reported.

According to the May 16 report, the measures include priority access to police emergency lines, home security assessments, and safety briefings from French law enforcement to ensure best practices are being followed.

France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau introduced the security measures as part of a broader effort to counter the recent wave of attacks.

“These repeated kidnappings of professionals in the crypto sector will be fought with specific tools, both immediate and short-term, to prevent, dissuade and hinder in order to protect the industry.”

Law enforcement officers will also undergo “anti-crypto asset laundering training,” Retailleau noted.

Retailleau met with several local leaders from the crypto industry to discuss the measures following three crypto-related kidnapping incidents in recent months.

Two kidnappings and a failed attempt in France this year.

The latest incident occurred on May 13, when assailants attempted to abduct the daughter and grandson of Pierre Noizat, CEO of the French crypto platform Paymium. Fortunately, they managed to fend off the attack, which occurred in broad daylight.

The assailants tried to force the pair into a waiting van, but Noizat’s daughter managed to take one of the guns off an assailant and throw it away, local police said.

On May 3, Paris police freed the father of a crypto entrepreneur who was held for several days in connection with a 7 million euros ($7.8 million) kidnapping plot.

In January, the co-founder of crypto hardware wallet provider Ledger, David Balland, was abducted from his home in central France during the early hours of Jan. 21. He was held captive until a police operation on the night of Jan. 22 secured his release.

Retailleau said earlier this week that he believes the incidents were likely connected.

There have been over 150 crypto-related robbery or kidnapping incidents since 2014, with 23 of those incidents occurring in 2025 alone, according to a GitHub database maintained by Bitcoin cypherpunk Jameson Lopp.

Lopp noted many of these criminals typically identify future victims through social media posts, public conversations, meetups, and conferences.

He strongly advises against peer-to-peer trades — particularly with people you don’t trust — flaunting wealth on social media and wearing crypto-branded clothing.

Even before Coinbase Global Inc. disclosed that hackers had stolen the home addresses and account balances of its customers, Jethro Pijlman was seeing an uptick in interest from concerned clients with large crypto holdings who were looking for bodyguards and other forms of protection.

Pijlman works for an Amsterdam-based firm that provides physical security and intelligence services to cryptocurrency holders who have become worried about the wave of kidnappings that have hit the industry — the most recent of which occurred last week, when assailants tried to abduct the daughter and grandson of a French cryptocurrency executive.

“We’ve had more inquiries, more long-term clients, and more proactive requests from crypto investors who don’t want to be caught off guard,” said Pijlman, a managing director at Infinite Risks International. “They’re realizing that intelligent security measures are part of the cost of doing business at this level.”

People with crypto wealth face unique physical risks because public blockchain networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum allow tokens to be transferred instantly and anonymously.

This means that if an individual is coerced into giving up the access credentials to their holdings, their assets can vanish within seconds with little chance of recovery.

Conversely in traditional financial services, bank accounts can be frozen or seized by law enforcement, allowing more chances to get back lost money.

The concerns about physical safety have come to the fore after the Coinbase attack because the hackers who penetrated the cryptocurrency exchange gained access to data that could allow them to identify and track down customers with large holdings — a frightening prospect just a few days after the kidnapping attempt in France.

Several victims of the Coinbase breach declined to speak on the record to Bloomberg, citing concerns that their security may be jeopardized by being named in a story.

“Crypto traders are acutely concerned about their privacy during data leaks,” said Ronghui Gu, co-founder of blockchain security firm CertiK and associate professor of computer science at Columbia University. “Cryptocurrency can be transferred with just a private key, and is extremely difficult to recover,” he added. “This makes crypto traders prime targets for criminals.”

The industry’s massive investments in protecting online systems may even be fueling the offline risks. Rapid crypto innovation has meant cracking cyber defences has become so challenging that adversaries are resorting to physical attacks, according to Charles Marino, CEO of the security firm , which provides intelligence reports about ongoing threats in the crypto industry.

“Right now, the crypto threat landscape is very high,” he said.

The elevated concerns around the safety of crypto executives and their loved ones are illustrated by the amount of money that Coinbase spends to protect its own chief executive officer, Brian Armstrong.

The company spent $6.2 million in personal security costs for Armstrong last year, according to an April regulatory filing that detailed executive compensation.

That’s more than the combined amount that JPMorgan Chase & Co., Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Nvidia Corp. spent on their respective CEOs, similar filings showed.

Representatives for Coinbase did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Coinbase has said that the leak affected less than 1% of its monthly transacting users. Yet for months, criminals had access to customer data that included their names, addresses, government-ID imagery, transaction history and account balances.

Customer support workers in India were bribed to offer access to the company’s data.

Criminals have already used the information to trick some Coinbase customers into handing over access to their accounts or transferring their tokens. As with data leaks from traditional banks, personal information can be used for online fraud and identity theft.

But the physical threats are of particular concern to crypto investors, many of whom have long operated anonymously to avoid threats.

In the attempted kidnapping in Paris last week, criminals targeted family members of the CEO of Paymium, a French crypto exchange. While that attempt was foiled, it was only the latest in a string of similar attacks.

David Balland, a co-founder of French crypto wallet startup Ledger SAS, was left with a mutilated hand after he and his partner were kidnapped in January.

The attacks have escalated enough that France’s Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau on Friday promised to establish a priority emergency police number for the industry. Elite French police units will also offer special briefings and security check-ups for crypto executives and their families.

On social media, the kidnappings and recent Coinbase attack have led traders to say they’re avoiding trips to France any time soon.

EthCC, an annual crypto conference in Cannes, has increased security measures for this summer’s gathering, according to a spokesperson for the event.

This has included coordinating with multiple branches of French law enforcement, special forces and private security firms, they said, rather than just local police as had been done in previous years.

These issues, though, have not just been confined to France. One Bitcoin security expert, Jameson Lopp, keeps a running public database of physical attacks on cryptocurrency holders. It documents more than 20 incidents around the world this year alone.

A number of US firms that work with digital tokens are paying for protection for executives. Circle Internet Group Inc., which declared its intention to go public earlier this year, spent about $800,000 on personal security for CEO Jeremy Allaire in 2024 while Robinhood Markets Inc. spent about $1.6 million on Vlad Tenev, according to company filings.

The amount these companies spend pales in comparison to the costs at some technology giants. Meta Platforms Inc.’s Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet Inc.’s Sundar Pichai racked up $27.2 million and $8.2 million, respectively, in personal security costs, though their businesses are more valuable than any crypto company today.

In addition to bodyguards, Pijlman’s firm, , offers armored vehicles, home security assessments and social media monitoring to ensure that clients aren’t revealing information about their physical location.

“It often takes a close call or a story in the news to prompt action, but once they understand the threat, they want to take it seriously,” he said. “People are waking up to the fact that their digital success can create very real-world risks.”