Completely naked, another Bitcoin tycoon "fell to death in a foreign country"

Another Bitcoin tycoon has died mysteriously in a foreign country.

The deceased, Ye Junde, was around 40 years old, born in Hong Kong and later emigrated to Canada. He started trading Bitcoin in 2013, and the scale of crypto assets under his management before his death was claimed to be as high as 2 billion US dollars.

In the early morning of August 7, 2026, Ye Junde was found dead naked at the bottom of an apartment building in Asuncion, the capital of Paraguay.

After investigation, the police speculated that Ye probably jumped from the 30th floor, with no obvious knife wounds or external trauma on his body, and suicide is highly likely.

But when the police arrived, the door of Ye Junde's apartment was wide open, and the room was extremely messy.

According to reports from some Western media, for a period of time before his death, this wealthy man showed extremely abnormal behaviors: he suddenly began to refuse to wear dark clothes, refused to take the elevator, and would rather take the long fire passage to go up and down the stairs. In the last few hours before his death, he had dinner alone in his room.

The confusing clues have sparked various speculations about the cause of Ye's death:

Kidnapping? Poisoning? Or the increasingly rampant "wrench attack" that has been widely talked about in recent years?

Indeed, the mysterious death of this wealthy man is not an isolated case.

In the past two years, the crypto wealthy circle has been very unstable, and major cases of crypto tycoons happen every few days ——

They are either kidnapped or killed.

Bitcoin Tycoons Are Being Hunted by Kidnappers Worldwide

Due to the inherent gray attributes of cryptocurrency since its birth, crypto tycoons are easily associated with elements of crime and fleeing. This is not particularly rare.

But recently, homicide cases related to the crypto circle have occurred almost every year.

In 2022, Nikolai Mushegian, who participated in multiple crypto projects, drowned mysteriously on a beach in Puerto Rico. A few hours before his death, the 29-year-old American computer scientist publicly stated on social media that someone was going to take his life;

In 2023, a 39-year-old Argentine crypto tycoon nicknamed "Lettuce" was shot twice in the back and killed on the spot. His body was dismembered and packed into a red suitcase;

In 2024, a group of people broke into the apartment of 25-year-old Canadian crypto internet celebrity Kevin Mirshahi, kidnapped him and three other people. Four months later, the police found his rotting body in a local park;

In the above cases, cryptocurrency is more like giving these wealthy deceased people an identity, and what caused their deaths is actually debt, hatred, or some undetermined reasons.

However, after entering 2025, the number of kidnapping and homicide cases directly related to cryptocurrency began to surge. Some people named this type of case "wrench attack" —— criminals use pure violent coercion as a means to force wealthy people holding cryptocurrencies to hand over their private keys, mnemonic phrases or passwords, so as to seize huge assets.

According to statistics, 48 wrench attacks occurred worldwide in 2024, and the number of recorded wrench attacks in the first half of 2026 has reached as high as 52.

Kidnapping, torture, coercion, death threats... This set of criminal methods sounds very "old-school", but now it is widely used by lawbreakers in the "cutting-edge" crypto circle.

Using the most primitive method to plunder the most digital wealth.

In July 2024, a typical wrench attack took place in Kyiv:

After learning that a 29-year-old Moroccan man held digital assets worth about 1.2 million RMB, four criminals found his address, tied him to a car, took him to an abandoned building on the outskirts of the city to coerce him with death, forcing him to "transfer money".

But after the man cooperated, the criminals did not keep their promise to release him. Instead, they strangled him to death, then transported the body to the forest for burial.

Another wrench attack that took place in Vienna was even more terrifying, and the victim was a 21-year-old rich second generation.

He did not get rich from crypto trading, but held a large amount of digital assets. On November 25, 2025, he was abducted by two criminals and was beaten with blunt instruments for a long time in an underground parking lot in the local area.

After paying the ransom to save his life, the dying rich second generation was stuffed into a black car, then the criminals set the car on fire and burned him alive.

Of course, not all wrench attacks end with the killing of the hostage.

Some lucky people can still survive with their lives.

In May 2025, a 28-year-old Italian cryptocurrency businessman went to New York to meet his friends in the crypto circle, but was tricked into a luxury villa and experienced 17 days of cruel torture: he was tied up, given electric shocks, cut by a small chainsaw, hit with a gun butt, doused with tequila and set on fire, and dragged to the top of a 5-story stairwell to be threatened to be thrown down......

And all of this was just to force the businessman to reveal the password that could access his Bitcoin account. In the end, the businessman pretended to yield to temporarily trick his torturers, ran to the street covered in blood, and stopped a law enforcement officer to call the police.

In the same month, in Paris, France, an old man who was about to go out to walk his dog was tied up by three strong men into a disguised UPS delivery van and taken to an empty house in the south of the city.

There, the old man had his hands and feet tied, was beaten, and a video of him was recorded and sent to his son who runs a cryptocurrency business. The kidnappers demanded 8 million euros worth of cryptocurrency as ransom. If the transfer was not made, they would start cutting the old man's fingers one by one, then shoot through the old man's knees, and then kill him.

The good news is that the old man was successfully rescued by the police 58 hours after being kidnapped, but the bad news is that he really lost a section of his finger.

Such cases have emerged in endlessly in the past 48 months, making everyone in the crypto circle feel threatened.

In reports from media such as Reuters, some crypto tycoons who have long been known for their high-profile behavior have begun to move frequently, while others deliberately take different routes to go home after work;

The trading platform Kraken began to equip company executives with private security, and the co-founder of another platform Origin Protocol said in an interview that he recently began to learn how to use firearms.

In June 2025, when the Ethereum Conference was held in Cannes, France, the organizers first deployed local police, special forces and coast guards into the security system of the venue, and were fully on alert throughout the event.

Why did wrench attacks targeting cryptocurrencies suddenly surge in the past two years?

Has Crypto Trading Become a "High-Risk" Occupation?

To explain this, we have to mention a famous scene in the movie Crazy Stone.

In the film, in order to steal the jadeite, the international thief Mike prepared various professional equipment, ropes, and night clothes, and decided to carry out a technical theft scheme.

But for this, the character Heipi played by Huang Bo gave another solution:

"Just take a hammer and smash it (the glass) with one hit, then grab it and run. Who can react in time?"

The so-called wrench attack follows the same logic.

At first, this term came from a satirical comic in 2009: Faced with a computer encrypted with 4096-bit RSA that requires a huge sum of money to build a computing cluster for brute force cracking, the bad guy's choice was to spend 5 dollars to buy a wrench, arrest the computer holder and beat him up to solve the problem.

On the one hand, the threshold of using pure technology to "hack" cryptocurrencies online is extremely high.

It should be noted that even the North Korean hacker group UNC4899 relied on posing as recruiters on LinkedIn to trick wallet company employees into running malicious programs, so as to tamper with normal transfer requests and "steal" 300 million dollars worth of Bitcoin from a Japanese exchange in 2024.

On the other hand, obtaining passwords or mnemonic phrases by beating crypto tycoons offline not only has extremely high "cost-effectiveness", but also has extremely low "transaction friction" costs.

Just imagine, if the criminals kidnap a traditional wealthy person and want to get 10 million US dollars from his account, the kidnappers will immediately face a large number of problems such as bank account identity verification, large-value transfer review, anti-money laundering system, account freezing and police tracking, and even the storage and transportation of physical currency.

However, if all the wealth of this wealthy person is placed in cryptocurrency, according to Chainalysis' report this year: he alone, through the permutation and combination of several strings of characters, can directly control the flow of millions of dollars of funds through a mobile phone or hardware wallet, and most transfers do not require institutional approval.

For investors, the flow of finance has never been so smooth.

For kidnappers, obtaining ransom has never been so convenient.

CertiK's statistics found that the average amount involved in each wrench attack in 2025 was 270,000 US dollars, but in 2026 the amount directly surged to 2.39 million US dollars.

Behind this, the overall wrench attack is becoming more and more large-scale and industrialized.

The aforementioned "French finger-cutting case" is just one of a series of wrench attacks that occurred in that country at that time.