French cops free mother and son after 20-hour crypto kidnap ordeal

A mother and her ten-year-old son are now free after being kidnapped for around 20 hours while the father was being extorted for hundreds of thousands of euros. Counter-terrorism officers from the Groupe d'intervention de la Gendarmerie nationale (GIGN) freed the pair from a hotel room in Val-de-Marne at around 06:00 local …

[Anonymous Coward]

Crypto is "digital gold"?

Sounds about right.

And you'd have to be bonkers to keep hundreds of thousands in gold just sitting on your computer desk.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

Keep it in your phone instead?

[DS999]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

Nah that would make it way too heavy!

[Antron Argaiv]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

I had mine cast into a toilet.

May as well get some use out of it

[doublelayer]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

It doesn't seem to matter very much in this case because it's not like these criminals have stolen it by hacking into a computer. If you keep your gold securely stored in a locked room but someone kidnaps your loved ones, the room's security isn't protecting you against the problem you're facing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

Investors who own gold through their brokerage account, and store it in locked bank vaults, don't get kidnapped. When was the last time a family was terrorized by criminals who demanded their shares in an S&P500 index fund?

Physical possession of anything valuable is a considerable risk to personal safety. Cash, gold, crypto, jewelry, Hermes purses, whatever.

Would be nice if our species was peaceful, but we're not. Unfortunately that's just the way it is.

This is why we can't have nice things.

[doublelayer]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

They can easily get kidnapped for those things because those things can be converted to cash. There's some extra inertia because converting shares of stock into cash takes a while and you have to sort out delivery*, but other than that, there's no reason it can't work and it has happened plenty of times in the past. If there was something special about it, then theoretically storing your cryptocurrency at an exchange so it's not on your equipment would protect you, but this wouldn't. Do you think kidnapping for ransom was invented when cryptocurrency was or that there was somehow a gap between the bad old days and today? I don't know why cryptocurrency people are specifically targeted here, but I think you've exaggerated its role.

* Another benefit to cryptocurrency is that it can be received by the criminals without having to go through the physical exchange process, but since these criminals already have gone to the extent of physically kidnapping and imprisoning people, that difference isn't as big as it is for something like an upstart malware creator.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

But that's an extremely rare occurrence because crooks are extremely unlikely to get away with kidnapping someone just because their family has a large paper net worth. It's the stuff of Hollywood thrillers, but it's just not happening on a regular basis. The transaction friction kills the crime fantasy.

What attracts the crooks are things they can imagine putting in a bag and escaping with: cash, precious metals, crypto, jewelry, drugs, etc.

That's the bait and that's what creates the risk. Those are the stories we hear. I've lost count of the number of recent crypto-related kidnappings.

When's the last time you remember a ditzy heiress getting kidnapped from her college dorm room because her dad's hedge fund made five gazillion dollars in the stock market?

[doublelayer]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

Kidnapping for ransom is relatively uncommon, as in sometimes zero, in many countries altogether, so that's not really proof of much. But since you ask, I do remember the US having a high-profile kidnapping not too long ago, and it wasn't someone who had a lot of cryptocurrency. It was a person whose family had plausible access to money.

The fact is that even if we assume that cryptocurrency's easy transferrability is the only reason behind this, it would be easy for anyone with stocks to sell them and buy some to pay the ransom. Perhaps the focus on cryptocurrency people is because the criminals think they're easier to identify or to kidnap than any random rich person. That seems to be your argument as well; you don't seem to be saying that investing in cryptocurrency actually makes the kidnappers' jobs easier, just that it attracts them. If they ran out of targets there but the kidnapping part was working great, they could easily find a different kind of wealthy target.

[Blazde]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

Physical possession of anything valuable is a considerable risk to personal safety. Cash, gold, crypto, jewelry, Hermes purses, whatever.

I like to keep Fabergé eggs in my Hermes bag so the robber gets an extra surprise when they open it ( https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cj6098jngryo )

[W.S.Gosset]

Re: Crypto is "digital gold"?

>When was the last time a family was terrorized by criminals who demanded their shares in an S&P500 index fund?

That was exactly how Russia's communists sustained their catastrophic "superior" economic disasters for many many years. Seizing & stripping bank vaults of private holdings (safety deposit boxes etc), selling everything they found. For things with separate title like share certificates & non-bearer bonds, they'd arrest the owner & hold him until they were signed over. Held hostage, basically.

The amount of (ex)private gold & investments sold into the West to prop up the left-wing disaster by buying supplies from the West was absolutely prodigious.

Speaking of left-wing patterns, Hitler did the same & for the same reason, but to maintain his nationalist wrinkle vs standard socialism restricted it to the Jews & other "undesirables" and held off on native Germans.

Speaking of left-wing patterns III, Pol Pot did the same but the culture mostly used silver in personal possession so they exhausted banks pretty quickly and just cleared out people's houses.

[Doctor Syntax]

Four arrests is a good start. Were there any arrests in the previous French cases? If not, let's hope they can link these four back to the others.

[Joe Gurman]

Nice to hear the husband didn't pay the ransom

Nothing says "crypto investor" like blowing off the wife and kid to protect his speculative "investment."

[tiggity]

Re: Nice to hear the husband didn't pay the ransom

Standard advice in kidnapping is to contact the police, so the person was sensible.

Fairly obvious reasons e.g.

No guarantee criminals will not injure / kill the hostages.

No guarantee that paying the ransom will be the end of things (if you pay up then flagged as an easy mark & same gandg or their pals likely to target you again)

[Fruit and Nutcase]

Ingenious method to keep you and your crypto safe

Absolutely no risk of crooks endangering you or your folk and taking your crypto

https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/11/bitcoin_drive_landfill/

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time this gets in the news, the kidnappers failed miserably. Why are there so many out there that manage to convince themselves they'll succeed?