Violent thefts targeting cryptocurrency holders have already surpassed $30 million in successful losses during the first half of 2026, putting the year on course to exceed 2025’s record $58 million, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis. The figures cover cases in which victims were forced to surrender funds, rather than attempted extortion or transfers later stopped, frozen, or recovered.
The crime wave has shifted cryptocurrency security from a problem of hacked accounts and compromised private keys into a personal-safety issue for prominent holders, executives, and their families. Home invasions, abductions, and hostage situations—often called “wrench attacks”—are designed to exploit the speed of blockchain transfers and the limited ability to reverse them once assets leave a wallet.
Chainalysis estimated that the value linked to all reported physical-coercion attempts, including unsuccessful cases and recovered funds, reached roughly $107 million by mid-2026. That compares with $180 million for all of 2025 and about $316 million in 2024. The company said the numbers are likely incomplete because many victims do not report attacks publicly or to authorities.
France emerges as the main hotspot
France has recorded the sharpest increase in publicly known incidents. Chainalysis logged only a small number of crypto-related violent cases in the country before 2025, then counted 19 during 2025 and 30 by the middle of 2026.
Laurent Nunez, France’s interior minister, said in late June that authorities had documented more than 70 violent incidents connected to cryptocurrency. Cases have extended beyond Paris to Strasbourg, Marseille, Grenoble, Toulouse, Nantes, and smaller municipalities, according to Chainalysis.
The firm’s monthly estimate puts the pace of attacks in France and elsewhere at about 4.6 cases a month in the first half of 2026, up from 1.9 a month during 2025. France’s organized-crime prosecutors reported roughly 200 arrests, 88 indictments, and 75 suspects in pretrial detention by mid-year in connection with the cases they were investigating.
Chainalysis linked the French surge partly to the exposure of sensitive data connected to cryptocurrency reporting and taxation. A tax official in the Paris region was accused in 2024 of stealing and selling files containing information on wealthy crypto holders, including names, addresses, phone numbers, reported holdings, and tax records.
Two January 2026 developments preceded a further acceleration, according to the firm: French authorities publicly disclosed the tax-data case, while crypto tax-reporting company Waltio said a separate breach affected about 50,000 users. Such records can give criminal groups a starting point for identifying targets, locating homes, and estimating whether a robbery could yield a large payout.
Criminals increasingly pressure relatives
Attackers are also expanding beyond the person believed to control the wallet. Chainalysis said family members, partners, friends, and other acquaintances were targeted in roughly 25% to 30% of cases by early 2026, compared with close to zero in 2021. In France, more than 40% of recorded incidents involved relatives or associates.
That pattern can make conventional wallet security less effective as a complete defense. A holder may use strong passwords, hardware wallets, and offline backups, but an attacker who can threaten another person may attempt to turn the victim’s own access controls into the route for a transfer.
Kidnappings made up 52% of Chainalysis’s 2026 incident dataset, while home invasions represented 37%, up from 14% in 2025. The categories overlap in practice. Chainalysis said about six cases it labeled kidnappings—mostly in France—could be classified as home invasions under a different method, making residential attacks potentially the most common form of physical coercion this year.
The targets are overwhelmingly local residents rather than travelers. Chainalysis found that locals represented 93% of victims in France, 82% in Brazil, and 77% in the United States. The concentration suggests that attackers frequently conduct advance research instead of selecting victims opportunistically.
More attacks, but fewer successful transfers
The growing number of incidents has not translated directly into a higher proportion of successful thefts. Chainalysis said 26% of attempted physical-coercion thefts resulted in payment through late June 2026, down from 49% in 2025 and 67% in 2024.
The lower payment rate could reflect stronger police responses, improved victim awareness, operational failures by attackers, or the difficulty of moving large holdings controlled through more complex custody arrangements. Chainalysis did not assign a single cause.
CertiK, a blockchain security company, separately reported 52 verified physical-coercion cases globally in the first half of 2026, involving more than $124 million in financial exposure. Its measure differs from Chainalysis’s successful-theft tally, illustrating how totals can vary depending on whether researchers count demands, blocked transfers, and assets subsequently recovered.
Once a forced transfer succeeds, the stolen assets can move rapidly through the blockchain economy. Chainalysis said some proceeds are sent directly to centralized services, while others pass through decentralized protocols, blockchain bridges, and cross-chain tools that complicate tracing. In one case described by the firm, funds moved through an instant exchange and into a suspected laundering service tied by Chainalysis to cartel laundering networks, terrorist-financing clusters, and wallets associated with an alleged cocaine trafficker.
Physical security joins wallet security
Recent cases show the violence is not limited to threats made online. A former police officer identified as Halem received a life sentence in August 2026 for stealing $350,000 in cryptocurrency from a teenager in Los Angeles, according to the supplied court-case account. Federal prosecutors also charged three Missouri men in the first week of August over an alleged plan to raid a Connecticut home with air rifles and steal hundreds of millions of dollars in digital assets.
The cases place greater weight on limiting the public trail around substantial holdings. Social-media displays of wealth, public disclosure of wallet balances, and personal information attached to tax, company, or event records can help criminals narrow their search.
Wallet design can also reduce the value an attacker can access from one person in one location. Multi-signature custody requires approval from multiple keys, which can be held separately by trusted parties or in distinct places. Some hardware-wallet systems also support duress features that can expose a limited balance rather than an account’s full holdings.
Those tools carry operational trade-offs, particularly around recovery and coordination, but the evidence from France and other markets shows why custody planning increasingly extends beyond preventing remote theft. A large cryptocurrency balance may now create risks tied to identity, address data, and the safety of people close to the holder.
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