Second Crypto Home Invasion Since August: Masked Men Tie Up Couple in Landes

Tied Up at 3 a.m. in Mont-de-Marsan

Three masked men broke into a house in Mont-de-Marsan, in south-west France's Landes region, at around 3 a.m. on Thursday, tied up a couple in their 60s and demanded cryptocurrency. The intruders woke the pair from sleep, bound them with adhesive tape and plastic zip ties, and pressed them to hand over their digital assets. When the captives seemed unable to meet the demand fast enough, one of the masked men delivered a blow with an adjustable wrench to the back of the 63-year-old husband's head. The group then fled with a laptop and a mobile phone, leaving the injured couple to call the police themselves.

The response moved quickly once the attackers were gone. Firefighters took both victims to hospital for checks, and officers recovered the tools used in the assault at the scene. The three suspects had not been identified or caught as the local account of the raid was published. The break-in is the second crypto-linked home invasion recorded in the Landes area since August, and its choice of loot tells its own story. Burglars rarely carry off a laptop, yet such a machine can hold the keys to a crypto wallet, and the intruders appear to have gone in expecting digital assets rather than resale goods. Whether the crew obtained any funds is not yet known. The victims were asleep when the raid began, and investigators are now working to establish what exactly the attackers were after and whether anything beyond the two devices left the house.

Investigators Point to the Couple's Son

Investigators believe the couple were not the intended targets. Their inquiries into the son's line of work pointed them to him: he is employed in the crypto sector and lives at another address, and authorities have placed him under police protection. The working theory is that the attackers went after the parents to reach assets linked to the son, a pattern French police have seen repeatedly this year.

The choice of loot follows the same logic. A laptop or a phone can store a crypto wallet or the private keys that control it, which makes such devices worth stealing even though an encrypted wallet would be worth very little to whoever ends up holding the hardware. The Landes region has seen this before. In August, a couple in Rion-des-Landes were kidnapped in their home by captors demanding access to their bitcoin. The husband was later located naked and hurt in Solférino; his wife turned up in a vehicle nearby. Police arrested two suspects, and the case passed to the interregional jurisdiction in Bordeaux.

The national numbers give the local raids their context. The Interior Minister, Laurent Nuñez, announced that crypto-related crime rose in the first half of 2026, with 77 cases of kidnapping, extortion or attempted extortion on record and around 200 arrests. Blockchain security firm CertiK counts 33 of the 52 wrench attacks recorded worldwide in the first half of the year as having taken place in France. The firm attributes that concentration to the size of the country's crypto sector, public displays of wealth and a run of data leaks. One of those leaks hit the French tax authority and laid out records covering 678,000 taxpayers, names, addresses and income figures among them. France has carried the label of crypto kidnapping capital since early in the year.

Where the National Count Falls Short

The Mont-de-Marsan raid widens the target set again: relatives of ordinary sector employees, not only prominent holders or executives. Police protection for the son answers the immediate threat, but the exposed surface is the household itself, and the loot was hardware that could hold a wallet address or the keys behind it. Hardware isolation of the kind offered by devices such as Tangem Pay, combined with encryption, is what decides how little a stolen machine yields; in this case the crew left with equipment whose contents may prove unreadable. The national count has its own boundary: it tallies recorded cases, and a raid like Thursday's may never enter the statistics unless investigators formally classify it as crypto-linked.