£10K Reward Offered After UK Couple Attacked in Crypto Home Invasion

Three men forced their way into a West Midlands home and made a couple transfer a large sum of cryptocurrency while a fourth person relayed instructions over a video call, in an attack police believe was planned and targeted.

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Crimestoppers, an independent charity that takes anonymous crime tips across the UK, is offering a reward of up to £10,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction. The appeal went out on Wednesday, more than nine months after the attack.

The couple returned to their house in Smith’s Wood, in Solihull on the eastern edge of Birmingham, at around 5.20pm on Saturday, December 13. As they opened the front door, three men got out of a car parked nearby and pushed in behind them.

The husband was assaulted and suffered significant injuries, West Midlands Police said, and his wife, who was pregnant with the couple’s third child, was threatened with a knife. The pair were coerced into moving the money to a wallet the attackers controlled, BBC News reported. The men left with the funds and several high-value watches in what is believed to have been a black BMW X3.

All four are thought to be in their twenties. Face coverings and hoods have made descriptions difficult, though one was described as a black man with a small diagonal scar beneath his left eyebrow.

“Four people planned this and four people know exactly what happened that evening,” said Alan Edwards, Crimestoppers’ regional manager for the West Midlands, who added that others would have been told afterwards or noticed someone suddenly flush with money.

Crypto “wrench attacks”

Home invasions were the defining shift in physical attacks on crypto holders in the first half of 2026, according to CertiK, rising to 20 cases, about 41% of all incidents, from a single publicly reported case a year earlier. The security firm verified 52 attacks in total, with recorded exposure of $124.1 million.

CertiK also described an increasingly layered structure, with organizers who buy data and coordinate logistics sitting above the people who carry out the attacks. In this case, the fourth participant who directed the assailants by video call, without being in the room, appears to align with that description.

Europe accounted for three quarters of the cases CertiK verified, though France rather than the UK has been the centre of the wave, with 33 incidents in the first half of this year alone. Just this week, a worker in the crypto industry was attacked and forced to transfer his cryptocurrency holdings in a home invasion that saw his wife and children held prisoner.