Three men will stand trial in a crypto kidnapping case in Novosibirsk, Siberia. They are accused of abducting a cryptocurrency holder in August 2025, holding him for about a week and forcing him to move more than 1.3 billion roubles in crypto to their wallets, the Novosibirsk regional prosecutor’s office said on 27 October 2026. That is about $16.1 million at the Bank of Russia rate for 28 October. Prosecutors also say two of the men took 50 million roubles from the victim’s flat. The news is the court referral, not the attack: the events are 14 months old, and none of the accusations has been tested at trial.
A deputy prosecutor of the Novosibirsk region approved the indictment and sent the case to the Zheleznodorozhny District Court of Novosibirsk. The release names neither the victim nor the three accused, who are presumed innocent until a court rules otherwise.
The crypto kidnapping in Novosibirsk, as the prosecutor tells it
According to the prosecutor’s account, the men wanted the victim’s property. In August 2025 they put him on the back seat of a car against his will, threatened him with violence dangerous to his life and health, and drove him to premises in Ob, a town just west of Novosibirsk. There, the release says, they kept him until he had given them the keys to his flat, his home address, and the logins and passwords of his crypto wallets, along with access to them.
He was then moved to Sosnovka, a village in the Iskitim district of the same region. Prosecutors say he was held there for a week, until digital currency worth more than 1.3 billion roubles had been sent to the accused men’s crypto wallets. The release presents this as the investigators’ version of events.
Two of the three also used his keys to get into the flat, where they took 50 million roubles, according to the release. It does not say whether that sum was banknotes or money kept in some other form, and neither Kommersant nor RBC Novosibirsk specifies it.
Four charges, split by role
The charges differ from one defendant to the next, according to the role prosecutors give each man. Taken together, the case covers four articles of the Russian Criminal Code:
- kidnapping committed by a group, with the threat of violence and for gain (Article 126, part 2, points a, v and z);
- extortion (Article 163, part 3, point b);
- robbery on a particularly large scale (Article 162, part 4, point b);
- theft (Article 158, part 4, point b).
The release does not say which man faces which count. Kommersant, which cited the prosecutor’s office as its source, described the accused as three local residents. Its summary of the extortion charge puts the sum at more than 1 billion roubles, while its headline and the prosecutor both give more than 1.3 billion.
1.3 billion roubles is about $16 million, with a caveat
The rouble totals are the prosecution’s figures. Converted at the official Bank of Russia rates for 28 October 2026 (80.5307 roubles per dollar, 90.0977 per euro), they give the following amounts.
| Item (prosecutor’s figure) | Roubles | US dollars | Euros |
|---|---|---|---|
| Crypto sent to the accused’s wallets | more than 1.3 billion | about $16.1 million | about EUR 14.4 million |
| Money taken from the flat | 50 million | about $0.62 million | about EUR 0.55 million |
| Total alleged | more than 1.35 billion | about $16.8 million | about EUR 15 million |
Treat the dollar figures as an order of size. The release does not say which coins were taken, how many, or on which date they were valued. Crypto worth 1.3 billion roubles in August 2025 would not be worth the same in roubles today, and the rouble itself has moved. Nor does the prosecutor say that the victim owned only what was taken, so the sum says nothing certain about his total wealth.
What the indictment leaves out
The prosecutor’s text is short, and several basic facts are missing. It gives no names, ages or jobs, for the victim or for the accused. It does not say how the victim was freed, when or how the three men were caught, or whether they are in custody. It does not say whether any of the crypto or money has been traced, frozen or seized.
There is no hearing date yet. RBC Novosibirsk and Kommersant both relay the prosecutor’s release and add no independent detail on these points. We found no statement from Russia’s Investigative Committee or the regional police on the case, and the release does not explain why 14 months passed between the abduction and the referral to court.
Those gaps matter for anyone reading the case as a crypto story. Without the coins or the addresses, nobody outside the investigation can follow the funds on a blockchain. Our guide on whether stolen crypto can be recovered explains why a forced transfer, once confirmed, is hard to reverse unless the coins reach an exchange that can freeze them.
Lopp’s list counts 39 attacks in Russia
The case fits a pattern that security researchers call “wrench attacks”: physical force used to make someone hand over their keys, which no software can block. Bitcoin developer Jameson Lopp keeps a public list of such incidents. On 28 October 2026 it held 753 entries, against 702 when we reported its jump after a bulk import ten days earlier.
By our count of the list’s data, it records 104 incidents for 2024, 167 for 2025 and 132 so far in 2026. France has the most entries in both years, with 26 in 2025 and 49 in 2026. Russia accounts for 39 entries in total, eight of them in 2025 and five in 2026. The Novosibirsk abduction does not yet appear in it.
Many of the Russian entries are smaller and cruder. In November 2025, the list says, a gang of three Moscow residents posing as law enforcement found crypto sellers online and demanded 17 million roubles from one trader. In April 2026, five teenagers in Ussuriysk burst into a man’s flat and beat him, convinced he held about 37 million roubles in crypto. He had none. In July 2026, four men in Moscow abducted an 18-year-old student, held him in a car for four hours and let him go after he sent them 80,000 roubles in crypto.
The list relies on press reports and court records, so a rise in entries can reflect better searching as much as more crime. Hundreds of older cases were added in bulk in mid-October alone. In Russia alone it runs from fake police officers beating up delivery couriers near Moscow in April 2026 to a 16-year-old crypto blogger threatened with a pistol in a Moscow car park in November 2025.
The same script in Toronto and in France
Other countries have seen the same script this year. In Toronto, police charged seven men, three of them army reservists, after a crypto business owner was abducted at gunpoint in July 2026; we covered those charges on 16 October. France, with 49 entries in 2026, remains the country where Lopp’s list records the most attacks this year.
Russia is also changing how crypto changes hands. Under a law in force since 1 September 2026, peer-to-peer deals between individuals become illegal on 1 July 2027, and the Bank of Russia says people may not move coins from a regulated account to their own wallet, as we reported when it set out the P2P and self-custody rules. Nothing in the Novosibirsk release links the case to those rules.
General safety practice for holders (not from the release)
This section is general practice, not drawn from the prosecutor’s release. In the Novosibirsk account, one man’s logins and passwords were enough to empty his wallets once he was in his captors’ hands. Holders who fear that scenario often keep most of their funds where one person cannot move them alone: a multi-signature wallet whose other keys sit with someone else, or a time lock that delays withdrawals by days. Neither helps if attackers know who you are, which is why many holders never say how much they own. Our explainer on self-custody sets out what holding your own keys means for security.
Next step: a date at the Zheleznodorozhny court
The case now goes to the Zheleznodorozhny District Court, which has not published a hearing date. The defendants can contest each charge. Until the court rules, the account above is the prosecution’s version of events, and the amounts are allegations.