French Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez promised a "more ambitious" response to a rising wave of violent crypto robberies. The country has recorded 77 wrench attacks, in which criminals force victims to surrender private keys or wallet access at gunpoint or knifepoint.
Wrench attacks bypass every technical security measure. A hardware wallet, a cold storage vault, or a multi-signature setup offers no protection when someone holds a gun to your head and demands the seed phrase. This makes them fundamentally different from hacks, exchange collapses, or smart contract exploits. The attacker doesn't need to break cryptography or find a software flaw. They need a target with known or discoverable crypto holdings and willingness to use violence.
Nuñez said France would pursue a three-part plan, though the Interior Ministry has not yet published specific details of what those measures entail. The announcement signals political acknowledgment that physical security for crypto holders has become a law enforcement priority in France.
France's tally of 77 incidents is notable because few other Western nations publish or aggregate wrench attack statistics with the same precision. The French government's decision to track and publicly report the count suggests officials view the trend as serious enough to warrant policy response. Whether other countries face similar rates but don't report them, or whether France genuinely faces a higher frequency, remains unclear without comparable data from peers.