Three French men are suspected of kidnapping a 74 year old man to extort his son's encrypted assets, torturing him for nearly 16 hours. After discovering the "wrong person", the hostages were released On February 3rd, according to DLNews, French police arrested three men in their twenties on suspicion of kidnapping and torturing a 74 year old man in an attempt to extort $3.5 million worth of cryptocurrency from his son. Officials told reporters that the 74 year old man suffered nearly 16 hours of torture from the gang. According to French media Actu 17, the police claimed that the three individuals kidnapped the unnamed elderly man from the victim's home in the city of Walloon in the southeastern province of Iser at dawn on January 25th. The victim was forcibly stuffed into a car and taken to the back of a bar in Valence. It is reported that the attackers filmed videos of themselves torturing the elderly there. Subsequently, the gang sent the torture video to the elderly man's son through encrypted messages, demanding that he pay an unnamed cryptocurrency as ransom. When they finally realized that the elderly man's son was not the "cryptocurrency millionaire" they had wrongly speculated about, but just a web developer with few cryptocurrency assets, they decided to release the victim at 11 pm on the same day and pushed him from the car to the roadside. Kidnapping and other violent attacks related to cryptocurrency are on the rise globally. The situation in France is particularly prominent, according to data from Certik, the country has reported 19 cases of so-called 'wrench attacks' (i.e. obtaining cryptocurrency through violent threats). Last year, French authorities successfully rescued David Balland, co-founder of cryptocurrency hardware company Ledger, and his wife who were kidnapped by criminals attempting to extort ransom.