Evan Luthra recounts his kidnapping in Oxford: $2 million in crypto gone in 30 minutes

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Nearly a million dollars has since been recovered. The trial will not take place before November 2027, a deadline that French victims of crypto-kidnapping know well.

On November 4, 2025, Evan Luthra sits in a private car with four other passengers. According to his account at BeInCrypto, the vehicle suddenly turns towards an isolated road.

Five masked men board. They hit him and warn the group that they are only there for him.

The attackers start with his watch. It's a special edition Richard Mille, which the police estimate at 450,000 pounds.

Then they put his phone in front of his face. Face ID unlocks the device, and the exchange apps follow.

On Binance, just over $1.5 million in assets are leaving. Around $600,000 in ETH then leaves his Gate account. The kidnappers even tried to reach his bank accounts before getting out of the vehicle, half an hour later, in the Five Mile Drive area north of Oxford.

“There were five of them, so I gave them everything,” sums up Luthra.

No one needed to hack anything. A face, a phone on and connected accounts were enough.

Most major exchanges, however, offer a whitelist of withdrawal addresses, which blocks any sending to a wallet not registered in advance. An attacker can demand its deactivation on the spot. But each added step lengthens a scene that the kidnappers want as short as possible.

Once his devices are collected, Luthra calls his contacts at Binance and MEXC. Part of the funds are frozen en route.

Binance returns approximately $370,000 to him. The rest is through an order made under the Proceeds of Crime Act, the British law on the proceeds of crime. According to Luthra, this is the first order of this type targeting Binance.

In total, he recovered just under a million dollars. On the other hand, he criticizes the police for having delayed giving him access to his phone, a delay which according to him would have increased the bill.

His gratitude to Binance took an unexpected form. In the wake of the record hack of October 29, estimated at $6.3 billion and attributed by the FBI to North Korea, he explained on X that he kept nearly $10 million on the platform for his daily trading.

I was kidnapped last year and had over a million dollars stolen from my Binance account. And right now, in the middle of the biggest crypto hack has ever seen, I still have almost $10M sitting on Binance. Here's why. Part of that money got frozen after it was taken. A few… https://t.co/FSdKepMmto pic.twitter.com/nZaeBZH1ht

Machine-translated from French