A businessman was beaten with hammers in his own home and his pregnant wife threatened with a knife, in a robbery that forced the couple to hand over hundreds of thousands of pounds in cryptocurrency. The attack, in Solihull, West Midlands, is now at the centre of a police appeal — and of a wider warning: UK crypto holders are increasingly being targeted not through hacks, but through violence against them in person.
What happened in Solihull
The attack took place on 13 December 2025 at around 5.20pm, as the couple — who have not been identified, and who the BBC refers to by the pseudonym “James” for the husband — returned to their home in the Smith’s Wood area of Solihull. Three masked men forced their way in behind them.
James, an amateur cryptocurrency trader, said he tried to fight the intruders off before being struck repeatedly with hammers to the face, head and ribs. His wife, who was seven months pregnant with the couple’s third child, was pinned to a sofa, threatened with a knife and, James said, had a pillow held over her face.
“The door gets pushed open, I can see gloves coming in, balaclavas,” James told the BBC. “They threatened my wife and my baby.”
The three men inside the house did not appear to know how to access cryptocurrency themselves. Instead, a fourth person, connected via a live FaceTime video call, directed them — telling them which apps to open on James’s phone and which wallet held the funds. The ordeal lasted around 45 minutes before the attackers left with the transferred crypto and several Rolex watches, reportedly in a black BMW X3.
West Midlands Police is investigating. Crimestoppers announced a £10,000 reward for information on 24 September 2026 — more than nine months after the attack — describing all four suspects as being in their twenties, with one described as a Black man with a small diagonal scar beneath his left eyebrow.
Not an isolated case
Security researchers call this category of crime a “wrench attack” — using physical force or intimidation, rather than hacking, to get someone to unlock a device or authorise a transfer. The term exists precisely because no amount of cryptographic security stops someone being coerced in their own living room.
And the Solihull case fits a documented UK pattern, not a one-off. A joint report from blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs and London’s Metropolitan Police found 17 reported wrench attacks in London alone between March and December 2024, with kidnapping accounting for 59% of cases, aggravated burglary 35% and robbery 6% — an average loss of roughly $880,000 per incident.
Security firm CertiK’s data shows the pattern accelerating through 2026: home invasions became the dominant form of crypto wrench attack in the first half of the year, rising to 20 cases — about 41% of all incidents globally — up from a single publicly reported case the year before. CertiK verified 52 wrench attacks in total for the period, with combined recorded exposure of $124.1 million. Separately, blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis put the total stolen in violent crypto robberies at around $30 million (roughly £22.6 million) through June 2026, and said 2026 could become the worst year on record for the crime, with home invasions specifically on the rise.
The UK has a longer history of this than the Solihull case alone suggests. One of the country’s first reported crypto home invasions dates to 2018, when four armed men broke into the Oxfordshire home of trader Danny Aston, tied up his partner and forced him at gunpoint to transfer Bitcoin. In 2021, a Canterbury Christ Church University student was held at knifepoint in his accommodation by eight men and forced to hand over £6,000 in Bitcoin and a £3,000 student loan. Between 2021 and 2022, a group of teenagers carried out a series of knifepoint robberies across London, stealing more than £115,000 in digital assets — they were eventually caught after using stolen bank details to order takeaway food to their own homes.
Why crypto holders specifically
Chainalysis has pointed to the structural reason this keeps happening: the physical security assumptions that protect conventional wealth — vaults, armoured transport, a bank standing between an attacker and the money — simply don’t exist for assets held in a self-custody wallet. If a criminal can identify who holds crypto and get them alone, the “security” is whatever is in that person’s head, and that can be beaten out of them. In the Solihull case, the attackers reportedly didn’t even need to understand wallets or seed phrases themselves — they just needed to control the room while someone else, on a video call, did the technical part.
What this means for UK holders
This is a security story, not an investment one — nothing here is a reason to buy, sell or hold anything. But for anyone who holds meaningful crypto themselves, security researchers and police appeals like this one point to the same practical takeaways:
- Avoid publicising crypto wealth — on social media, in local communities, or to anyone outside your household. Both TRM Labs’ and CertiK’s data suggest targeting is often enabled by someone knowing a holder has funds worth taking.
- Consider splitting holdings across cold storage, multi-signature setups or custodial accounts, rather than one wallet a single person can be forced to unlock.
- Decoy or limited-balance “duress” wallets are used by some holders specifically so there is something to hand over under threat that isn’t everything.
- If you are ever threatened like this, personal safety comes first — transferring funds under duress is recoverable in a way an assault victim’s injuries are not.
Anyone with information on the Solihull attack is asked to contact Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555 111.
Sources
- ITV News — “Reward offered after crypto heist gang threatens to kill victim’s pregnant wife”, 2 October 2026
- Bitcoin.com News — “Masked Robbers Threaten Pregnant Wife in UK Crypto Home Attack”, 2 October 2026
- Decrypt — “£10K Reward Offered After UK Couple Attacked in Crypto Home Invasion”, 24 September 2026
- TRM Labs — “The Rise of Wrench Attacks and Crypto-related Violent Crime”
- CryptoTimes — “UK Crypto Trader Beaten in Home Invasion as Gang Threatens to Kill Pregnant Wife”, 2 October 2026
- 99Bitcoins — “Solihull Crypto Robbery Exposes the Human Cost of Wrench Attacks”, 2 October 2026
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