Two Texas brothers have been sentenced to a combined 326 months — more than 27 years — in federal prison for a violent home-invasion robbery in which they held a Minnesota family at gunpoint for hours and forced the father to hand over more than $8 million in cryptocurrency.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. District Judge Donovan Frank in St. Paul sentenced Raymond Christian Garcia and Isiah Angelo Garcia, both of Waller, Texas, on Thursday to 180 months and 186 months respectively — the equivalent of 15 years and 15 and a half years. Both men had pleaded guilty in June. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Minnesota announced the sentences.

According to court documents, the brothers traveled from Texas to Grant, Minnesota, and on September 19, 2025, broke into the victim's home. They zip-tied the family and held them at gunpoint for more than nine hours while demanding access to the father's cryptocurrency accounts.

When the victim failed to transfer the amount his attackers expected, they forced him to drive one of the brothers to the family's cabin in upstate Minnesota to retrieve additional hardware wallets so they could move the funds. Hardware wallets are small offline devices that store the private keys controlling cryptocurrency funds, and because blockchain transfers generally cannot be reversed once completed, assets secured this way can typically only be moved with physical access to the device or its credentials. In total, the pair compelled him to transfer more than $8 million. They fled after the victim's son called 911 and were later arrested near Houston.

"The Garcia brothers committed a brazen and calculated act of violence against the victim and his family," U.S. Attorney Daniel Rosen said in a statement announcing the sentences. The FBI's Christopher Dotson said the brothers "violated the sanctity of a home" in "a brazen act of violence and greed."

The case is a stark example of what is known as a "wrench attack," a form of violent crime in which criminals rely on physical force and coercion rather than hacking to seize cryptocurrency from holders. The term has become shorthand for robberies in which victims are physically coerced into surrendering their digital assets.

Such attacks have surged alongside rising cryptocurrency prices. Chainalysis counted 46 violent incidents targeting crypto holders in the first half of 2026, with more than $30 million stolen, while blockchain security firm CertiK pegged the losses even higher.

Recent incidents elsewhere illustrate the global reach of the trend, including a kidnapping in France in which the children of crypto industry workers were held hostage, and a home invasion in the United Kingdom that ended with prison terms for the attackers.

The sentencing offers one of the clearest signals yet that U.S. courts are treating crypto wrench attacks as serious violent crime.