France’s crypto industry is booming, however the industry is gripped by fear after a wave of kidnappings targeting entrepreneurs and their families — crimes that many insiders believe have been enabled by the very regulations meant to keep the sector secure.
In a chilling spree of violence over the past six months, victims have been abducted, tortured and mutilated in a series of brazen attacks with one common thread: their link to digital currencies. Criminal gangs, often operating in small, loosely connected cells, have begun to treat crypto players as the 21st century’s answer to high-stakes bank managers — only with weaker physical protection and faster digital loot.
The horror stories have shocked the nation. In one case, the family of a crypto influencer was ambushed in their home near the Swiss border. The father was subsequently discovered in the boot of a car, doused in petrol and badly beaten. In another instance, a young woman — the daughter of a prominent crypto CEO — was grabbed on a Paris street in broad daylight by men trying to force her into a van. Onlookers fought the kidnappers off, but the footage, caught on camera, reverberated through the crypto world.
“This is the new gold rush for criminals,” said Fabrice Gardon, head of the Paris judicial police. “They’ve moved from breaking into safes to abducting people with passwords.”
The brutality is escalating. In two separate attacks, kidnappers cut off fingers to pressure families into transferring ransoms, sometimes amounting to millions in crypto. One victim was threatened with a drill to the knee. While most of the kidnappings have been thwarted, 24 suspects were arrested this week in Paris alone, including in a botched attempt to abduct a crypto entrepreneur’s daughter.
These aren’t isolated incidents. Industry leaders warn that new European regulations designed to combat money laundering are inadvertently serving as a goldmine for criminal networks. The rules require personal data — including names, addresses and even transaction histories — to be logged in public or semi-public registries.
“Everyone’s asking, ‘Who’s next?’” said Owen Simonin, a French crypto entrepreneur who survived an attempted armed robbery in 2022. “You can trace our home address, our digital assets, everything. It’s like painting a target on our backs.”
Simonin now lives behind fortified doors, security cameras and bodyguards. He’s not alone. Executives like Éric Larchevêque, founder of Ledger, now pay up to €100,000 a month for personal security. The cost of running a crypto firm in France, it seems, now includes protection from kidnap gangs.
Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, who recently met with crypto leaders under tight security, likened the attacks to old-fashioned bank heists — except with a digital twist. “Back then, they wanted bundles of cash. Now, it’s completely dematerialised,” he said.
Retailleau has announced measures including emergency lines to elite police units and security audits for targeted individuals. But officials remain tight-lipped on whether current regulations — particularly the EU’s sweeping MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets) rules — will be amended to limit public access to sensitive data.
Crypto leaders say change is urgent. “The more we comply with transparency laws, the easier it becomes to find and follow us,” said Stanislas Bartholemi, head of ADAN, France’s main crypto business lobby. “The law was meant to protect, but it’s now exposing us.”
Bartholemi and others have called on EU regulators to rethink the balance between anti-money laundering enforcement and personal safety. In a cruel paradox, some of the very data-sharing intended to deter crime is being weaponised by criminals themselves.
Cybersecurity consultant Renaud Lifchitz believes that few of the ransom attempts actually succeed — authorities have in many cases frozen and retrieved funds before they could be laundered. But he warns that the real issue is how criminals are finding their targets in the first place.
“It’s about access,” Lifchitz said. “Hackers are breaching corporate databases, public registries, government records. There’s a vast pool of compromised information out there.”
A recent KPMG-Ipsos survey found that 12 percent of French citizens now own cryptocurrencies. But as public awareness grows, so too does the perception — true or not — that these individuals are sitting on untold wealth. For France’s digital finance elite, anonymity is no longer just a preference — it’s a lifeline.
Alexandre Stachchenko, strategy director at Paymium, put it bluntly: “If we try to stay discreet, the law tells us we’re acting suspiciously. But if we follow the law, we become targets. So what do we do?”
It’s a question now hanging over Europe’s crypto experiment. In the race for regulation, have lawmakers simply handed the keys to the kingdom to the very criminals they hoped to thwart?
