Prosecutors in Russia's Ivanovo region have arraigned five men on charges of kidnapping a young programmer and torturing him to hand over 10.4 BTC in cryptocurrency. The defendants, most of them ex-convicts, face up to 15 years in prison on the new charges, which fall under Russia's kidnapping and aggravated robbery statutes.

According to the local media outlet Kommersant, the victim — a man in his early twenties — landed on the suspects' radar after posting photographs of supercars, including a Ferrari, a BMW and a Mercedes, on social media. He also traveled outside the country with fair regularity.

Was the victim a crypto influencer?

Despite the luxury-car imagery on his social media, investigators said the programmer targeted in the 10.4 BTC kidnapping earned his money as a product supplier for large companies. The gap between the influencer-style imagery and his actual line of work highlights how public displays of wealth can mark holders as targets regardless of how the money is earned.

The five defendants, identified by News.ru as Antonov, Bronnikov, Chervyakov, Kozlov and Zaynutdinov, reportedly kept the victim under surveillance and mapped his movements before they struck. Their ages ranged from 28 to 52.

The accused men made their move on September 6, seizing the programmer and cuffing his hands as he approached a shop. Using a Peugeot they had bought from car thieves, they drove him to a garage cooperative called Energetik. There, masked and pistol-wielding attackers beat the victim for about five hours, threatening to burn him with an iron and a soldering iron and at one point saying they would cut off his ears.

The perpetrators extracted 1 million rubles in cash from the programmer. They also collected an iPhone and a MacBook and took over his accounts, transferring another 10.4 BTC — approximately $800,000 — to an address investigators have not identified as of this report. While every Bitcoin transaction is recorded on a public ledger, tying a wallet address to a real-world owner generally requires investigative work that goes beyond the blockchain itself.

At the end of the ordeal, the victim was dumped, still bound, in a forest. Russian authorities estimate the total damage from the attack at more than 84 million rubles.

How the gang was arrested

Investigators cracked the case after a Ukrainian drone attack knocked out internet service, forcing the crew to abandon the messaging apps they had been using and switch to ordinary phone calls. Police intercepted those conversations and tracked down all five men.

Mobile internet outages have become common during drone attacks in Russia. Authorities say the shutdowns prevent raid drones from navigating using cellular networks.

Police arrested the suspects across Russia, from Yaroslavl to Yekaterinburg, St. Petersburg and Tver. Some of the loot has already gone toward apartment and car expenses, according to investigators.

All five had previously served prison terms for serious offenses and met behind bars. A court ordered three of them to be held in custody until late December 2026. With the receiving address for the stolen Bitcoin still unidentified, the fate of the 10.4 BTC remains one of the case's open questions.

Wrench attacks continue to spread

The case fits a documented rise in “wrench attacks,” in which criminals use violence to force crypto holders to hand over their keys — a threat model popularized by a well-known webcomic in which a $5 wrench defeats even the strongest cryptography. CertiK logged 52 verified attacks over the first half of 2026, with about $124.1 million in exposure; 39 of those incidents occurred in Europe and 33 in France alone. Chainalysis, meanwhile, counted 46 such incidents worldwide in the same period, with more than $30 million taken and payment extracted in 12 of them.

Cryptopolitan has tracked the pattern spreading to the UK and earlier reported a £10,000 reward offered in connection with a Solihull home invasion.