Since 2020 there have been more than 215 documented cases of physical crypto attacks around the globe, with 2025's tally almost doubling the previous year's total.

New York

Small-scale cryptocurrency investors in the United States and Canada have become targets of violent crimes, including home invasions and kidnappings. Criminals are exploiting the irreversible and unprotected nature of crypto transactions, which lack safeguards such as FDIC insurance and withdrawal limits found in traditional banking.

Attackers identify victims through online leaks, hacks, and SIM swaps, focusing on individuals with moderate crypto holdings who are less likely to have advanced security. Victims have reported severe trauma and minimal financial recourse, even after legal action, as settlements often result in little to no recovery.

Small-time crypto investors are facing violent attacks

Rising prices certainly a catalyst for the crime but it's really the irreversible nature of crypto transactions. The fact that there are no protections that really struck me and has led to this surge in brutal home invasions and kidnappings. That's correct. You know a lot of the sort of traditional protections we have at traditional banks FDIC withdrawal limits. Those don't quite exist in the same way at all in the crypto industry which is fueling a lot of these tax because they're both irreversible and instantaneous. So I spent much of the last year sort of speaking to a lot of the victims of these crimes including a particular crime spree over the course of you know one to two years that affected you know half dozen victims involving physical attacks. And it's really quite horrific how some of these crimes have moved offline from from hack bit hacking to really brutal sort of injuries that have occurred in person through home invasions and so on. Yeah I don't want to give away the whole story and I encourage everybody to check it out on the Bloomberg terminal and at Bloomberg dot com Austin. But in the couple of minutes that we have with you can you can you talk a little bit about how this gang that you studied so closely for the last year was actually able to find victims to go after. You know it was really interesting. I think a lot of the coverage about these types of physical attacks is focused on sort of high flying sort of you know unsympathetic figures. You see people showing off their Lamborghinis on tick tock and how they made all this wild money through crypto investments. But what we really looked at is the victims that are sort of small time investors and how they're increasingly becoming victims of these attacks. The gang that we looked at had sort of sourced them through things like leaks various hacks SIM swaps. These are sort of types of methods to access someone's account online to see what types of funds they have. And they really focused on people who had big enough sums that it made worth sort of attacking but not too big where they might have extra security. So a lot of these attacks they were they were looking at victims or targets in places like North Carolina Texas Florida and a number of other states across the U.S. and also Canada as well. And they again were looking for for targets that that wouldn't be sort of suspecting that they would be attacked just because they were viewing these types of investments as not so different than a 401k. Right. I mean people who had maybe a couple hundred thousand dollars worth of crypto. So Austin what kind of recourse do people have. Very quickly here. There's not a lot of recourse. I mean one of the really interesting things is that after these attacks took place some of them didn't have they got nothing back even in the cases of where they had a class a lawsuit against someone that might have leaked their information. They all settled out of court leading to not much sort of money coming back. But again for the type of crimes that they sort of suffered I'm talking about people who forget the listeners here but they had forks stuck under their fingernails or they had they were held held at gunpoint. Really disturbing stuff.

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Breakdown