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Big players in the crypto sector argue that new European cryptocurrency rules may be enabling recent abductions and are demanding changes and more security.

#Write2Earn It’s not a new phenomenon—but these days, it’s a troublingly common one. On the same day Carturan left his captors, the crypto-crime watchdog group TRM Labs put out a report on the recent uptick in wrench attacks, noting that such acts “have escalated in both frequency and severity,” typically involving “high levels of violence that are extremely traumatic for the victims to endure.” Ari Redbord, a former federal prosecutor who now heads global policy for TRM Labs, gave me a blunt explanation for this surge: “We’ve seen the price of Bitcoin double in the last year or so. Criminals tend to go where the money is. These aren’t cybercriminals. These aren’t hackers. They don’t need sophisticated tools.”

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A few days later, longtime software engineer and Bitcoin maximalist Jameson Lopp gave a detailed presentation on the escalation in wrench attacks at the Bitcoin Conference in Las Vegas. After kicking off with a reference to that xkcd comic, Lopp deployed various graphs of reported wrench attacks over the years, noting that such assaults are still relatively rare compared with other crypto-related crimes (such as hacking or phishing), but that they do tend to spike whenever Bitcoin’s value balloons rapidly, like during the crypto craze of 2021. This year, Bitcoin’s value has reached all-time highs—and 2025 is on pace to see a record amount of wrench attacks worldwide.

Lopp emphasized that the total number will still be “relatively small”—the previous record-breaking year, 2021, only recorded about 35 attacks, most of them in the U.S. But the details common to these crimes are terrifying enough to warrant extra caution for crypto holders: home invasions, kidnapping, drugging. And, Lopp warned, “a decent number of these also involve torture.”

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#Write2Earn With the information provided by this battered trader—a 28-year-old Italian named Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan—the authorities quickly took the accused culprits, John Woeltz and William Duplessie, into custody. Per police reports, Carturan and Woeltz had ties to an unnamed New York crypto hedge fund; the latter had often “picked on” the former and, eventually, a disagreement over money led Carturan to fly back to Italy. Woeltz, who’d been spending time with Duplessie partying hard and splurging generously—including on that 17-floor, $30,000-a-month SoHo townhouse—persuaded Carturan to return to NYC early last month and allegedly hired an off-duty NYPD officer to pick him up from the airport on May 6.(It’s unknown whether the cop knew what was about to happen.) According to Carturan’s account, he only escaped after agreeing to give up the passkey to his Bitcoin wallet, claiming it was stored on his laptop; when his tormenters left him behind to fetch the computer, Carturan bolted from the premises.

#WriteToEarn Late last month, a shoeless and injured cryptocurrency investor fled from a posh Manhattan townhouse and approached the NYPD with a mortifying story: He’d just escaped 17 straight days of torture, having been held in SoHo and peed upon, forced to smoke crack, pistol-whipped, shocked with a Taser, cut with a saw, and dangled over a ledge. All because two fellow crypto enthusiasts, whom he personally knew, desired access to his multimillion-dollar Bitcoin fortune—and were willing to do anything to make him give up the password to his virtual wallet.

#WriteToEarn What is cryptocurrency? A cryptocurrency is a digital currency, which is an alternative form of payment created using encryption algorithms. The use of encryption technologies means that cryptocurrencies function both as a currency and as a virtual accounting system.

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