€40,000 crypto home invasion near Lens triggers organized extortion probe in France

Four hooded men broke into a family home in northern France, say prosecutors in Béthune, who have opened an organized extortion case.

The men tied up a couple and their two children and coerced the father into transferring €40,000 in cryptocurrency.

Four hooded men held a Vendin-le-Vieil family for over three hours

The break-in took place around 4 a.m. on Sunday, September 20, at a detached house in Vendin-le-Vieil, near Lens, in the Pas-de-Calais, on the rue Simone Veil.

Four hooded men burst in and tied up all four members of the family with black tape, a police source said.

Inside were a 40-year-old salary-earning IT worker in the cryptocurrency sector, his 41-year-old partner and their 12-year-old daughter and eight-year-old son.

Prosecutors said the father was insulted, threatened, and beaten until he relinquished his login details and identification codes.

Then he transferred €40,000 in cryptocurrency. The daughter was struck on the back of the head to wake her, a police source said.

The men remained for over three hours before fleeing in a vehicle, a police source said. The family freed itself and firefighters took over from 7 a.m.

Prosecutors said a forensic doctor will examine the victims in shock. A victim support group, France Victimes 62, was mobilized.

The charges at this stage include unlawful detention of several people and extortion by an organized gang, which can bring up to 20 years in prison.

Pas-de-Calais and Nord’s judicial police, along with France’s Anti-Cybercrime Office (OFAC), are working on the case. The police are still hunting for the four men.

Nuñez counted 77 cases by June against 45 in all of 2025

France has registered 77 kidnapping, detention, and extortion cases linked to crypto by the end of June, compared with 45 for all of 2025, Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said in July.

The national organized-crime unit, PNACO, tallied 18 cases in 2024. As previously reported by Cryptopolitan, authorities had charged 88 people by June.

France represented 33 of the 52 verified wrench attacks globally in the first half of 2026, which is about 63.5% of the world’s total.

In August, Cryptopolitan reported that a hacker was marketing tax records of over 678,000 French individuals and companies stolen from the tax authority DGFiP.

A DGFiP official is also accused of querying crypto-holder profiles in government software and of selling the data to criminal networks.

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