Two brothers from Waller, Texas, have been sentenced to a combined 366 months in federal prison for holding a Minnesota family at gunpoint and forcing the theft of more than $8 million in cryptocurrency.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota announced on Friday that Raymond Christian Garcia and his brother Isiah Angelo Garcia received prison terms of 180 and 186 months — 15 years and 15 and a half years, respectively — for their roles in the armed attack on the family.

U.S. District Judge Donovan W. Frank imposed the sentences on Thursday, after both men pleaded guilty on June 18 to one count each of interference with commerce by robbery, a federal charge covering robbery and violence that affect interstate commerce. As part of their plea agreements, the brothers also agreed to pay more than $8 million in restitution — the court-ordered repayment of victims' losses.

Nine hours at gunpoint

According to court documents cited by the Justice Department, the brothers drove from Texas to a home in Grant, Minnesota, on September 19, 2025, intending to steal the family's cryptocurrency. They bound the family members with zip ties and held them at gunpoint for more than nine hours.

Raymond Garcia, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, stood guard over the homeowner's wife and adult son, while Isiah Garcia forced the father — identified in court filings as Victim 1 — to log into his accounts and send his funds to a wallet the brothers controlled. When the first transfers fell short of what the brothers expected, Isiah Garcia drove Victim 1 roughly three hours to the family's cabin in northern Minnesota to retrieve a hardware wallet — a physical device that stores cryptocurrency offline — and move the remainder. In total, the theft exceeded $8 million.

By forcing the victim to open both his online accounts and his offline storage, the attackers sidestepped the security assumptions behind each, a dynamic that helps explain the broader pattern this case has joined.

How the Garcia brothers were caught

The brothers fled after the victim's son called 911. A September 2025 Justice Department account states that deputies found a suitcase in the tree line behind the home containing a disassembled AR-15-style rifle, ammunition, and a Wendy's receipt. That receipt helped investigators trace a rental car to the Houston area, where law enforcement arrested the two men near their home in Waller.

The Washington County criminal complaint initially pegged the stolen cryptocurrency at about $72,000 — far below the more than $8 million figure the U.S. Attorney's Office later disclosed. The victim believed some of his account information had been exposed in a data breach, and court filings state that the brothers were repeatedly on the phone with an unidentified third party who fed them details about the victim's accounts.

Part of a wider pattern of wrench attacks

The case adds to a documented rise in physical attacks on cryptocurrency holders, commonly known as wrench attacks — incidents in which perpetrators use force or the threat of it to make victims hand over digital assets, bypassing the technical defenses protecting those funds. Unlike a platform-level hack, the method targets the person holding the assets rather than the systems securing them.

According to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, 46 such incidents were recorded worldwide in the first half of 2026, with reported home invasions jumping from a single case in 2025 to 20.

Web3 security firm CertiK documented 34 attacks in the first four months of 2026 and estimated that these attacks have led to $101 million in losses. Notably, 82% of the wrench attacks occurred in France.

The Minnesota robbery fits that pattern precisely: a home invasion in which a family was held at gunpoint until holdings were surrendered, and a case that underscores why physical safety has become part of the conversation around cryptocurrency security.