How crypto criminals stole Ksh90M from people – often using age-old tricks
By BBC, January 19, 2026There’s something uniquely agonising about having your cryptocurrency stolen. All transactions are recorded on a digital ledger, known as a blockchain, so even if someone takes your money and puts it in their own crypto wallet, it is still visible online.
“You can see your money there on the public blockchain, but there’s nothing you can do to get it back,” says Helen, who lost around Ksh 40.7 million to thieves.
She likens it to watching a burglar pile up your prized possessions on the other side of an impassable chasm.
For seven years, Helen and her husband Richard (not his real name), both UK residents, had been buying and stacking up crypto coins called Cardano.
They liked the idea of investing in a digital asset that had the potential to rise dramatically in value, unlike funds saved in more conventional ways. They knew it was riskier, but they were careful to keep their digital keys safe.
But somehow hackers got into their cloud storage account, where they kept information about their crypto wallets and how to access them.
In February 2024, after a small test transfer, the criminals sent all the couple’s coins to their own digital wallets in a swift and silent attack.
The couple then watched for months as their money was moved from one wallet to another, powerless to do anything.
Helen and Richard are not wealthy. She is a personal assistant, he is a composer, and they had high hopes for their Cardano investments.
“We’d been buying these coins for so long… We used every scrap of money we could find to buy more,” says Richard. “Aside from my parents’ deaths, this theft is the worst thing to happen to me.”
Ever since, Helen has been on a mission to recover their money. She obtained detailed reports from various police forces and the Cardano developers. Now, even though she has the wallet address of the criminals, there is nothing anyone can do to unmask them.
They plan to save up enough to engage private investigators to try to trace the hackers.
“It leaves you with a feeling of helplessness,” she says, “but I am going to keep trying.”
An explosion in crypto crime
A survey conducted for the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) in August 2024 suggested that approximately 12% of British adults owned crypto-assets, which translates to roughly seven million people.
Globally, it has been estimated that 560 million people are now crypto owners. But as ownership rose, so did theft. The pandemic ushered in a surge in the value of crypto coins and, with it, an explosion in attacks on the industry.
And 2025 was another bumper year for crypto criminals, with total thefts standing at more than Ksh 438.6 billion according to investigators at blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis. The annual figure has remained in the same ballpark since 2020.
Most of the money is being stolen in massive cyber attacks on crypto companies. For example, North Korean hackers swiped Ksh 193.5 billion from crypto exchange Bybit in February 2025.
The losses in this case and the vast majority of others are covered by the deep-pocketed crypto firms, with little impact on individuals. But 2025 also saw an increase in the number of attacks on individual crypto investors.
Chainalysis research says these individual attacks rose from 40,000 in 2022 to 80,000 last year. Hacking, scamming, or coercing of individuals accounted for an estimated 20% of all crypto value stolen, estimated at Ksh 91.9 billion.
Physical threats and wrench attacks
Burglaries, muggings, and “wrench attacks” are on the rise. In Spain, a man was shot and held captive while criminals tried to steal his crypto.
In France, a cryptocurrency executive and his family were targeted, with one finger cut off during an abduction attempt. In the UK, masked men forced someone to transfer cryptocurrency valued at Ksh 240 million.
Criminals also rely on stolen data from luxury brands to identify wealthy crypto holders. One hacker purchased databases for KSh 48 million and scammed Coinbase users out of at least Ksh 193.5 million.
He confirmed ownership of Ksh 90.3 million in Bitcoin, stolen from a single victim.