UK charity Crimestoppers is offering a reward of up to £10,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction after a couple were attacked in their home near Birmingham and forced to transfer a large sum of cryptocurrency to a wallet controlled by the attackers. Police believe the raid, in which a fourth suspect directed the assailants over a video call, was planned and targeted.

The appeal was issued on Wednesday, more than nine months after the December 13 attack.

Our charity is offering a reward of up to £10,000 for information following a violent attack on a young couple in their home in Birmingham on 13 December 2025. If you have information about this attack, contact Crimestoppers 100% anonymously. pic.twitter.com/4q2rxXhH4t

— Crimestoppers (@CrimestoppersUK) September 24, 2026 source

Crimestoppers, an independent charity that collects anonymous crime tips across the UK, published an appeal for information on its website. Tips can be submitted without giving a name, and the charity forwards what it receives to the investigating force — a setup designed for people who do not want to go to the police directly.

Couple ambushed at their front door

The couple returned to their house in Smith's Wood, in Solihull on the eastern edge of Birmingham, at around 5.20pm on Saturday, December 13. As they the front door, three men got out of a car parked nearby and pushed in behind them.

West Midlands Police said the husband was assaulted and suffered significant injuries, while his wife — who was pregnant with the couple's third child — was threatened with a knife. The pair were coerced into moving the money to a wallet the attackers controlled, BBC News reported. The men fled with the funds and several high-value watches in what is believed to have been a black BMW X3.

All four suspects are thought to be in their twenties. Face coverings and hoods have made descriptions difficult, though one was described as a black man with a small diagonal scar beneath his left eyebrow.

"Four people planned this and four people know exactly what happened that evening," said Alan Edwards, Crimestoppers' regional manager for the West Midlands. He added that others would have been told afterwards, or would have noticed someone suddenly flush with money.

Crypto "wrench attacks"

Home invasions were the defining shift in physical attacks on crypto holders in the first half of 2026, according to security firm CertiK. Cases rose to 20 — about 41% of all incidents — from a single publicly reported case a year earlier. CertiK verified 52 attacks in total over the period, with recorded exposure of $124.1 million.

These assaults take their name from a well-known webcomic gag in which a $5 wrench defeats strong encryption, and the logic is the same: rather than attacking code or infrastructure, assailants target the holder directly and make the victim authorize the transfer themselves.

CertiK also described an increasingly layered structure, with organizers who buy data and coordinate logistics sitting above the people who carry out the attacks. In the Solihull case, the fourth participant who directed the assailants by video call, without being in the room, appears to align with that description.

Europe accounted for three quarters of the cases CertiK verified, though France rather than the UK has been the centre of the wave, with 33 incidents in the first half of this year alone. Just this week, a worker in the crypto industry was attacked and forced to transfer his cryptocurrency holdings in a home invasion that saw his wife and children held prisoner. CertiK's figures cover only the first six months of the year, so its next reporting window will show whether home-invasion cases across Europe held at that pace.