Experts offer crypto traders tips on foiling kidnappers

Escaping from zip ties, hiring bodyguards and other practical lessons in self-defence for Bitcoin investors, after a series of gruesome crimes spooked the community, writes David Yaffe-Bellany from Lugano, Switzerland

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The workshop was led by Peter Kayll, left, and Kevin Harris, two security consultants who met while serving in Iraq.

Pete Kayll, a musclebound veteran of Britain’s Royal Marines, had an unusual instruction for the Bitcoin investors gathered in Switzerland in late October.

“Just bite your way out,’ he told them.

It was the final day of a weekend-long cryptocurrency convention on the shore of Lake Lugano, near the Italian border. A small group of investors had lined up in a conference room to have their hands bound with plastic zip ties. Now they were learning how to get them off.

“Your teeth will get through anything)” Mr Kayll advised. “But it will bloody well hurt”

Most people don’t go to an international crypto conference expecting to learn how to gnaw through plastic. But after hours of panels devoted to topics like Bitcoin-collateralised loans, these investors were looking for something more practical. They wanted to know what to do if they were grabbed on the street and thrown into the back of a van.

Already paranoid aboutscams, hacks and market turmoil, wealthy crypto investors have lately become terrified about a much graver threat: torture and kidnapping.

This year, crypto investors or their families have been targeted by assailants more than 60 times, according to a tally of public reports, a string of gruesome attacks that has shocked the industry and made headlines worldwide. In France, the father of a crypto influencer was found in the trunk of an attacker's car — bound, beaten and covered in petrol. Thieves in Minnesota held a family at gunpoint for nine hours, demanding access to $8 million in crypto. And in Manhattan, federal prosecutors charged two men with kidnapping and torturing a crypto trader inside a luxurious 17-room townhouse.