Four hooded men broke into a family home in Vendin-le-Vieil, a town in the Pas-de-Calais area of northern France, in the early hours of Sunday, bound a couple and their two children with tape, and forced the father to hand over roughly €40,000 ($46,000) in cryptocurrency, according to reports by BFMTV, franceinfo and local outlet ICI. All four suspects remain at large.

According to the Béthune prosecutor's office the four intruders were hooded and entered the house at around 4 a.m. A police source told France Télévisions that the family was bound with black tape and held for more than three hours. The children are eight and twelve years old.

The 40-year-old father works as a salaried IT specialist in the digital currency sector, according to the Béthune prosecutor's office, which has opened an investigation into unlawful detention and extortion.

After searching the house, the men separated the father and assaulted him, making him "communicate his identification information and codes," a police source told France Télévisions. His twelve-year-old daughter was struck in the face with car keys, according to a source close to the investigation.

The attackers left with about €40,000 ($46,000), driving away before the family managed to work itself free. Firefighters reached the house at 7 a.m.

Prosecutors described the victims as in a state of shock. They were referred for forensic medical examination, and a victim support association has been assigned to the family. The case has been opened as kidnapping and extortion by an organized gang and handed to the regional judicial police alongside France's anti-cybercrime office. The case therefore combines a violent home invasion with an alleged attempt to obtain access credentials, rather than a theft carried out solely through digital means.

Wrench attacks in France

So-called "wrench attacks" involve criminals using physical violence or the threat of it to force victims to surrender access to their crypto holdings. In France, they have tended to target people with visible fortunes: previous cases include the father of a crypto millionaire, whose finger was severed, the wife of a Sandbox co-founder, and the chief executive of Binance France.

The Vendin-le-Vieil case differs in that the victim was a salaried IT specialist and the sum taken was in the low tens of thousands.

France has become the worst-affected country in the world for these attacks. The national anti-organised crime prosecutor's office has recorded more than 70 kidnappings and unlawful detentions linked to crypto in the first eight months of 2026, and authorities charged 88 people, some of them minors, in a crackdown earlier this year.

On a global scale, Chainalysis counted $30 million taken in wrench attacks during 2026, while CertiK put losses at $124 million across six months, a twelvefold rise.