French Tax Official Sold Data of Cryptocurrency Holders Leading to Kidnapping Surge
Ghalia C., a tax official in France, accessed tax records of cryptocurrency holders (including names, addresses, phone numbers, and holdings) and sold them to criminal gangs, leading to her arrest in June 2025.
French media reported that this incident is related to the frequent kidnappings and extortions of cryptocurrency holders; additionally, the tax reporting platform Waltio was hacked in January this year, resulting in the leakage of data from approximately 50,000 users; France requires proactive reporting of cryptocurrency assets, concentrating data into precise targets.
The leak of tax data directly translates into a list of targets for violent crimes, making France a hotspot for "ransomware attacks"; the beneficiaries are the criminal networks that possess the list, putting compliant holders' safety under pressure.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
France's mandatory reporting of cryptocurrency assets has created a centralized database, where a tax official misappropriated and sold holder information, compounded by leaks from platforms like Waltio, transforming compliance tools into sources for criminal profiling.
Resources are obtained through internal permissions and hacking methods to acquire high-value lists, motivated by the irreversible nature of self-custodied assets to implement violent extortion, with holdings and addresses becoming core indicators for selecting "worth visiting" targets.
Similar to historical instances where tax or banking data leaks led to targeted crimes; currently, there is a phase of overlapping cryptocurrency proliferation and physical security risks, revealing a fatal gap between reporting obligations and data protection.
This essentially represents an unintended consequence of regulatory changes: the intention behind centralized reporting is to strengthen tax collection, yet internal loss of control and leaks have created a tradable target database, with the mechanism being that the higher the concentration of information, the larger the radius of destruction from a single point of failure.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Once centralized data is leaked, it becomes a crime map
The cost of mandatory reporting may be physical security
Internal permission loss of control is more lethal than external hackers