Second man indicted in violent New York kidnapping crypto case

By Luc Cohen

A second man has been indicted in New York after being charged with kidnapping a man for three weeks in Manhattan's upscale SoHo neighborhood, shocking him with electric wires, and dangling him over a staircase to try to get him to give up his bitcoin password, prosecutors said on Friday.

A Manhattan grand jury's indictment of William Duplessie, 33, came after he made a brief court appearance earlier on Friday, three days after his arrest.

Prosecutors with the Manhattan District Attorney's office say Duplessie and John Woeltz on May 6 took a man's electronics and password and demanded they share his password so they could steal his cryptocurrency.

When the man refused to share his password, Duplessie and Woeltz allegedly began a series of brutal beatings over three weeks in a luxury townhouse until the man managed to escape. Woeltz was indicted on Thursday.

Neither Duplessie nor Woeltz has yet entered pleas, and their lawyers have declined to comment.

Both are due back in court on June 11.

Local media have called Woeltz, 37, a cryptocurrency investor and described the alleged victim as an Italian man. Both Woeltz and the alleged victim had ties to a crypto hedge fund in New York, the New York Times reported, citing an internal police report described by a law enforcement official.

Woeltz and Duplessie are accused of tying the man's wrists, hitting him on the head with a gun, and threatening to kill his family, according to criminal complaints against the two men filed in court.

The alleged incident comes as three cryptocurrency-linked kidnappings or kidnapping attempts have taken place in France so far this year. The rapid rise in the price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in recent years has created a new group of wealthy investors, who could be tempting targets for criminals, security experts told Reuters.