Crypto wrench attacks hit $124M as home invasions surge 20x

CertiK tracked just one crypto-related home invasion in the first half of 2025. A year later, its publicly verifiable tally had surged 20-fold.

Physical-coercion crimes, often called wrench attacks, bypass digital defenses by threatening a holder or relative until someone surrenders access or moves funds. The change turns a crime statistic into a custody-design problem: a secure key is not enough if one frightened person can release all the value immediately.

In CertiK's H1 2026 wrench-attack report, released July 23, the security firm counted 52 verified incidents across all attack types, up 33.3% from 39 a year earlier. It recorded roughly $124.1 million in financial exposure from losses and ransom demands, compared with about $10.5 million in H1 2025, an 11.8-fold increase.

Within the dataset, Europe accounted for 39 cases and France for 33, a clear concentration in the visible record.

A hardware wallet or offline seed phrase can still be bypassed as a sole safeguard when a holder is forced to unlock a wallet, reveal recovery material, or authorize a transaction. The first priority is therefore to eliminate unilateral authority over significant funds.

CertiK recommends multisignature or multiparty computation with geographically distributed signers so no person at the scene can approve the full transfer. The second layer adds time and limits through withdrawal delays, transaction caps, allowlists, and staged vaults. An independent emergency freeze is another way to stop a transfer without asking the person under threat to resist.