Crypto Investor Robbed at Gunpoint, $24 Million in Crypto Assets Stolen

On March 5th, prominent crypto user Sillytuna disclosed on social media that they had been the victim of a severe real-world violent robbery. The attackers used threats of violence to force them to hand over access to their crypto wallets, resulting in the theft of approximately $24 million in AUSD tokens. This incident has once again brought attention to the so-called 'wrench attack' – where criminals no longer rely on technical means to crack wallets, but instead directly obtain private keys or mnemonic phrases through physical threats.

According to Sillytuna, the hijacking involved weapons threats, kidnapping, and threats of sexual assault. Police have launched an investigation. The stolen funds were quickly split and transferred across chains: approximately $20 million was converted to DAI and deposited into two Ethereum addresses; $2.48 million was transferred to the Arbitrum network via a cross-chain bridge, and after passing through multiple Wagyu wallets, was used to purchase Monero, a privacy coin with strong anonymity, greatly increasing the difficulty of tracking; another approximately $1.1 million was transferred to the Bitcoin network via bridging services, with some funds suspected of entering mixing services to conceal the transaction trail.

To assist in recovering the assets, Sillytuna has publicly pledged a 10% bounty, encouraging the community to assist in tracking or returning the funds, and calling on major exchanges and on-chain analysis institutions to help freeze suspicious addresses. Although the attackers attempted to obfuscate the path through multiple transfers, some abnormal transactions were ultimately identified and intercepted by compliance systems, preventing further outflow of funds. The incident has sparked widespread discussion in the crypto community, with some users launching support actions, such as the emergence of a commemorative Meme token named after Sillytuna in the Solana ecosystem, with a portion of its transaction fees being used to compensate the victim's losses. Currently, the flow of related funds is still being continuously monitored.