Two men convicted for crypto kidnapping mistakenly estimated at 40 million euros in bitcoins

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https://cryptoast.fr/deux-homme-condamnes-pour-une-sequestration-crypto-en-seine-et-marne/

Two new convictions have just been handed down to criminals responsible for a crypto kidnapping carried out in the town of Juilly, in Seine-et-Marne, last February. A case apparently identical to the others which involved the attack on a couple and their daughter, with the objective of stealing the 660 bitcoins supposedly held by the father, estimated at 40 million euros.

It all started on February 6 in the early morning, when several hooded and gloved individuals burst into the victims' homes. They quickly put pressure on the father by violently holding his wife to the ground and taking his daughter, aged around twenty, into a neighboring room.

🔍 List of kidnappings and attacks linked to cryptocurrencies in France

The attackers seem to know exactly what they are looking for, due to their direct telephone connection with what looks like a sponsor, giving them instructions to follow. Target objective: a portfolio composed of 660 bitcoins, estimated at the time of the events at 40 million euros.

The criminals believe they have in their possession reliable information about this fortune in BTC, held on a Ledger hardware wallet. They then force the recalcitrant father of the family to allow them access in order to transfer the funds to an address that belongs to them, but everything will not go as planned...

Once the Ledger key is connected to the victim's computer, the originator on the phone will ask to see what the wallet contains. The surprise must then have been great, when he understood that the 660 BTC targeted as part of this targeted attack ultimately came down to 0.066 BTC in total, or just 4,000 euros.

How could such an error have occurred? A person close to the case interviewed by a journalist from Le Parisien explains that the information held by the criminals must have come from a “data leak on a platform specializing in crypto tax declarations”, which occurred a few weeks earlier. And the 660 bitcoins announced would ultimately be the result of a “declaration error” of several decimal places.

Faced with this situation, the criminals will leave with their victims' phones and computers, as well as a meager loot in cryptocurrencies estimated at less than 10,000 euros in total. The computer tower was found a few days later in their stolen vehicle, abandoned near the Virsac tollbooth in Gironde.

Machine-translated from French