Crypto Sells a Dream. Kidnappers Cash In.
Ask around at a dinner party in Manhattan, Los Angeles, or Miami, and sooner or later someone will lean over their glass of wine and ask, “How much Bitcoin do you own?” Sometimes they say XRP. It’s the modern password, the new measure of sophistication, the way people signal that they belong to a future of fast fortunes.
Over the past decade I’ve met well over a thousand crypto millionaires. Many of them follow me on Instagram. They message constantly, asking what coins I hold, what exchanges I use, and whether I think Bitcoin will hit a million dollars. I’ve met 15 people who would eventually become billionaires, long before their names appeared in Forbes or Bloomberg. Not one of them made their fortune through cryptocurrency. They built businesses. They scaled companies. They created value that could be taxed, regulated, audited, or sold. That is how billionaires are born.
The promise of crypto has always been different. It sells the dream of quick riches, of skipping the long grind, of being clever enough to catch a wave before the world catches on. But alongside that dream runs a darker current—one that rarely gets discussed in public. Crypto doesn’t just mint millionaires. It paints targets on their backs.
In May 2025, prosecutors in Manhattan told a story that sounded like a crime thriller but was very real. An Italian man was allegedly lured to a townhouse in SoHo, stripped of his passport and devices, and held captive for seventeen days. The kidnappers beat and tortured him, demanding access to his Bitcoin wallet. The victim escaped by rushing past his captors, bloody and terrified, onto a crowded New York street. Police later said they found a gun, body armor, and Polaroids documenting the ordeal. Two men were indicted and pleaded not guilty, but the case drew attention for what it revealed: the target wasn’t jewelry, or cash, or a safe deposit box. It was digital currency.
This wasn’t even New York’s first crypto-related kidnapping. In 2017, Louis Meza pleaded guilty after prosecutors said he orchestrated the abduction of a man at gunpoint and forced him to hand over the keys to a digital wallet containing more than $1.8 million worth of ether. Meza arranged for the victim’s keys and address to be stolen, and the proceeds vanished into the blockchain. The case was prosecuted like any robbery, but what was stolen wasn’t physical—it was a string of numbers and access codes.
These crimes expose something that crypto evangelists rarely talk about: the way digital wealth makes kidnapping easier, faster, and infinitely harder to reverse. If criminals want a quarter of a million dollars in cash, the logistics are cumbersome. They would have to walk you into a bank in broad daylight. Cameras would roll, tellers would ask questions, federal law would flag the transaction, and paperwork would slow everything down. Even if you managed to withdraw the funds, the paper trail would be long and the risk of getting caught high.
But in the crypto version, the entire script changes. A team of masked men forces their way into your home at night. They don’t want your Rolex or your credit cards. They want your private keys. Under duress you open your laptop and authorize a transfer. In a matter of seconds your entire fortune vanishes into anonymous wallets. The money ricochets across exchanges in three countries before the police even take your 911 call. By the time anyone investigates, the funds have been mixed, laundered, and lost in a sea of transactions. You are left not just as a victim of violence, but a ghost in a ledger that no government can subpoena and no detective can rewind.
This is not a theoretical risk. Around the world, real people have endured it. In Hong Kong in 2021, a crypto trader was kidnapped and beaten by a triad gang for nearly a week as they demanded HK$30 million in ransom. Police eventually rescued him and arrested seven suspects. In Ukraine in 2017, the executive of a crypto exchange named Pavel Lerner was abducted in Kyiv and released only after a reported $1 million bitcoin ransom was paid. In the Netherlands, a bitcoin trader was attacked in his home by men disguised as police officers who tortured him with a drill in front of his young daughter until he gave up his keys. In Manchester, England, police secured a combined 76-year sentence against a gang that kidnapped a man and forced him to transfer over £100,000 in crypto while subjecting him to months of violence. In Toronto, the CEO of WonderFi, one of Canada’s largest crypto firms, was forced into a car during rush hour in 2024 and released only after a ransom reportedly exceeding $1 million was paid electronically.
What ties all these stories together is not simply crime but convenience. Kidnappers and extortionists have existed for centuries, but crypto turns the payout into something instant and borderless. In the past, criminals needed bags of cash, shell accounts, or elaborate laundering schemes. The friction of the traditional banking system—its cameras, compliance departments, suspicious activity reports, and time delays—was a liability for them and, paradoxically, a layer of protection for us.
The features that make crypto attractive to enthusiasts are the same ones that make it dangerous in this context. Speed. Pseudonymity. Portability. A wallet that can hold millions on a flash drive or a piece of paper also makes its owner a prize that can be stolen with a single act of violence. The frictionless transfer across borders is what turns a local robbery into an international crime before breakfast.
It is fashionable to speak about Bitcoin as freedom, as liberation from central banks and the tyranny of fiat. Advocates paint it as a hedge against inflation, a revolution that replaces the dollar. But history is unkind to financial revolutions. Every system that begins in chaos eventually bends back toward stability and regulation, because stability is what allows societies to function. The dollar, with all its flaws, continues to buy groceries, pay mortgages, underwrite hospitals, and fund the operations of daily life. Crypto, by contrast, too often buys headlines, podcasts, and ransom notes.
I live a life of comfort today not because I speculated on coins but because I built something real during the dot-com boom in Santa Monica. I took risks, I won, and I turned those wins into a foundation that endures. If I want to burn through ten thousand dollars on a whim, I can. But I won’t throw it into Bitcoin, not because I can’t afford to lose it, but because I refuse to participate in the myth that digital tokens are salvation.
The truth is that billionaires build. They start companies, launch products, hire teams, pay taxes, and create value that lasts. Crypto millionaires, too many of them, end up as cautionary tales. They flash their wealth online, and criminals notice. They move their savings into keys and cold wallets, and kidnappers find them. They live with the risk that one bad night could wipe them out entirely.
Bitcoin may reach a million dollars one day. It might soar beyond imagination. And when it does, fortunes will be made and fortunes will collapse. But when the lights flicker, when the ransom note slides under the door, when the hospital bill arrives, it is the dollar—not Bitcoin—that saves lives.
The dream is intoxicating, but dreams are cheap. The nightmare is what’s expensive. And in a world where masked men can turn your seed phrase into their payday, it’s worth remembering that sometimes the friction of a bank teller, the slowness of a wire, and the bureaucracy of compliance are not the enemy. They’re the last guardrails between wealth and ruin.
