Four hooded men broke into a family home in northern France and coerced the father into transferring €40,000 in cryptocurrency, prosecutors in Béthune said, announcing an investigation into extortion by an organized gang.

The break-in occurred at around 4 a.m. on Sunday, September 20, at a detached house on the rue Simone Veil in Vendin-le-Vieil, near Lens in the Pas-de-Calais. According to a police source, the assailants bound all four members of the household with black tape: a 40-year-old salaried IT worker who works in the cryptocurrency sector, his 41-year-old partner, and their two children, a 12-year-old daughter and an eight-year-old son. The incident was documented in local media reporting.

Prosecutors said the father was insulted, threatened and beaten until he surrendered his login details and identification codes, after which he transferred the €40,000 in cryptocurrency. A police source said the 12-year-old girl was struck on the back of the head to wake her. The case also illustrates a structural feature of cryptocurrency: a transfer, once made, cannot be reversed, and moving funds requires only the login details and codes that the attackers demanded.

The intruders remained in the house for more than three hours before fleeing in a vehicle, a police source said. The family managed to free itself, and firefighters took over from 7 a.m. Prosecutors said a forensic doctor will examine the victims, who are in shock, and the victim support organization France Victimes 62 has been mobilized.

The charges at this stage include unlawful detention of several people and extortion by an organized gang, offenses punishable by up to 20 years in prison. The judicial police of the Pas-de-Calais and Nord departments are working on the case alongside France's Anti-Cybercrime Office (OFAC), a pairing that reflects the investigation's two tracks: the physical break-in and the forced transfer, which remains recorded on the public blockchain. The four suspects remain at large.

Crypto-linked violence on the rise in France

Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said in July that France had registered 77 kidnapping, detention and extortion cases linked to cryptocurrency by the end of June, compared with 45 for all of 2025. The national organized-crime unit, PNACO, tallied 18 such cases in 2024. As previously reported by Cryptopolitan, authorities had charged 88 people by June. The outlet has also reported arrests of suspected crypto robbers in Marseille and on French couples becoming targets of crypto theft.

France accounted for 33 of the 52 verified wrench attacks — physical assaults intended to force crypto transfers — recorded worldwide in the first half of 2026, roughly 63.5% of the global total.

In August, Cryptopolitan reported that a hacker was marketing tax records of more than 678,000 French individuals and companies stolen from the tax authority DGFiP. A DGFiP official has also been accused of querying crypto-holder profiles in government software and selling the data to criminal networks.