Bitcoin Kidnapping: Italian National Tortured 17 Days for $28M Wallet Access
IndeterminatePhysical coercion was applied — the full outcome is not documented.
In May 2025, Nicola Carturan, an Italian national, was abducted and held captive for approximately 17 days in a luxury townhouse in Manhattan's SoHo district by John Woeltz and William Duplessie. The perpetrators sought forced access to Carturan's Bitcoin wallet, which prosecutors alleged contained approximately $28 million in BTC. During his captivity, Carturan endured severe torture including electric shocks, a chainsaw assault, forced ingestion of crack cocaine, being suspended over the building's roof edge, and being set on fire. Rather than succumb to the coercion and surrender his credentials, Carturan employed a survival strategy: he promised his captors he would retrieve his laptop containing the wallet password if allowed temporary freedom.
When Woeltz departed to facilitate this retrieval, Carturan fled barefoot from the townhouse. Law enforcement responded and arrested both suspects. Both Woeltz and Duplessie were indicted on charges of kidnapping, assault, and coercion. As of the record date, both entered not guilty pleas.
The case illustrates an extreme custody vulnerability: physical coercion against the sole knowledge holder of a self-custody Bitcoin wallet. Carturan's decision to prioritize escape over asset recovery demonstrates that passphrase-protected self-custody, while resistant to remote compromise, remains vulnerable to in-person adversaries with access to the holder. The legal proceedings were ongoing at the time of reporting.
| Stress condition | Coercion |
| Custody system | Software wallet |
| Outcome | Indeterminate |
| Documentation | Present and interpretable |
| Year observed | 2025 |
| Country | United States |
What custody structure can and cannot protect against coercion
The relevant structural question is not whether a custody setup can prevent coercion — it typically cannot — but whether it can limit what an attacker can obtain through coercion. A setup where the holder has sole knowledge of all credentials, with no geographic distribution and no multisig threshold, gives an attacker everything they need by controlling one person. A setup where credentials are geographically distributed, where multisig requires coordination with parties in other locations, or where a passphrase-protected decoy wallet exists, limits what any single physical attack can yield.
Observed cases in this archive range from violent home invasions and kidnappings to subtler forms of coercion: legal threats, family pressure, business disputes that escalated. The outcomes depend on whether structural protections existed and whether they held under pressure. Setups with no geographic distribution or threshold requirements produced the worst outcomes.
The legal dimension adds complexity: transactions executed under coercion are technically valid. The blockchain cannot distinguish voluntary from involuntary signatures. Recovery after a coerced transfer depends entirely on legal processes — identifying the attacker, prosecuting, and attempting asset recovery — which is slow, expensive, and uncertain.
The most effective structural protection against coercion is geographic key distribution combined with a signing threshold that cannot be met from one location. An attacker who controls one person in one place cannot force a transaction that requires coordination with key holders in other jurisdictions. This protection requires accepting coordination overhead during normal use.