In short
- Two Ukrainian nationals have been arrested for the torture and murder of a 21-year-old student in Vienna whose body was found burned in his car.
- The victim’s teeth are said to have been knocked out before he was doused with petrol and set on fire, choking on his own blood before the flames consumed him.
- Police discovered withdrawals from the victim’s crypto wallet and seized a large amount of cash from the suspects, although the motive remains officially unclear.
Austrian police have arrested two Ukrainian nationals for the alleged torture and murder of a 21-year-old student whose body was found burned beyond recognition in his Mercedes after a violent attack that emptied his crypto wallet.
Local media identified the student as Danylo K., son of the deputy mayor of the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, who discovers in the backseat of his car around the early morning of Nov. 26, after flames and smoke triggered a fire alarm in a nearby residential complex.
Vienna police announced A 19-year-old and a 45-year-old suspect were arrested in Ukraine on Tuesday, three days after they fled across the border.
Although the motive for the crime remains unclear, there are recordings of the victim crypto wallet were discovered, making a greed motive seem likely, authorities said.
The suspects will not be extradited as the case has now been transferred to Ukrainian authorities at their request, police said.
The attack is said to have started in the garage of the Sofitel hotel, where the younger suspect allegedly ambushed his fellow student before being forced into his own Mercedes, driven to Donaustadt, beaten so severely that his teeth were knocked out and left to suffocate before being doused in gasoline and set on fire in the back seat, according to local media. report.
“The fire investigation showed that the fire in the car was started with the help of gasoline,” police said in a statement. “Investigators recovered a melted canister from the back seat.”
Crypto ‘key attacks’
The murder in Vienna comes amid a rise in physical attacks targeting crypto holders, known as wrench attacks.
Jameson Lopp, co-founder and chief security officer at self-custody platform Casa, who has a database tracking wrench attacks has documented nearly 70 attacks this year, with more than 30% of them taking place in Europe.
Last weekend, a man posing as a delivery driver in San Francisco tied up a homeowner and forced him to do so Surrender $11 million in crypto.
Earlier this month, court documents in Canada detailed a 2024 home invasion that saw a family tortured as attackers stole $1.6 million worth of Bitcoin.
The pattern has become deadly in some regions, as Russian crypto promoter Roman Novak and his wife were last month murdered in the UAE after meeting men posing as investors and demanding access to his wallets.
“Europe has several converging factors: relatively dense urban environments, strong cryptocurrency adoption in certain corridors, and highly capable organized crime groups that already have experience with armed robbery, extortion and kidnappings historically linked to drugs and cash,” Ari Redbord, VP, global head of Policy and Government Affairs at TRM Labs, told Decrypt.
“Crypto extortion logically fits into their existing toolkit,” he said.
As digital theft becomes more difficult due to multisig, hardware wallets, operational security and stricter exchange controls, “criminals may increasingly resort to coercion rather than hacking,” Redbord said.
“It doesn’t mean wrench attacks won’t become common, but as long as crypto represents a highly liquid, borderless asset, physical targeting remains an attractive fallback method,” he added.
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