A founder of a French cryptocurrency company and his wife were freed in France this week after being brutally kidnapped and held for ransom, the authorities announced on Thursday.
David Balland, a founder of Ledger, a company that sells physical devices to store crypto assets, was abducted alongside his wife early on Tuesday from their home in Vierzon, a city in central France, according to the Paris prosecutor. The couple were whisked away by car, then separated and detained at different locations, the prosecutor said.
The kidnapping set off a broad investigation involving more than 230 officers who sought to locate the couple. In the end, they freed them without firing a shot, the authorities said at a news conference in Paris on Thursday evening.
“This was an extremely complex case,” said Gen. Ghislain Réty, the head of an elite unit specializing in hostage rescue that freed the couple.
The Paris prosecutor, Laure Beccuau, said that the kidnappers had contacted another founder at Ledger and demanded that a large ransom be paid using cryptocurrency. She said investigators were still establishing how much in total they had requested.
The company alerted the gendarmerie, the police force in smaller towns and rural and suburban areas of France. French news outlets that caught wind of the investigation were urged to refrain from publishing any details to avoid jeopardizing the couple’s safety.
The gendarmes rapidly located Mr. Balland in Châteauroux, about 30 miles southwest of his home, and freed him on Wednesday. He was hospitalized because of a “mutilation” inflicted by the kidnappers to his hand, Ms. Beccuau said.
An official with knowledge of the investigation, who was not authorized to speak publicly about an ongoing case, said that the kidnappers had sent an image of Mr. Balland’s mutilated finger to pressure the company.
Part of the ransom was paid during negotiations with the kidnappers, Ms. Beccuau said. “Almost all of that cryptocurrency was tracked, frozen and seized,” she said.
On Thursday, by using surveillance of some suspects, analyzing phone records and questioning several people who had already been arrested, investigators located Mr. Balland’s wife in Étampes, about 80 miles north of Vierzon.
Officers found her tied up in a car but otherwise unharmed, Ms. Beccuau said.
In all, nine men and one woman, ages 20 to 40, have been taken into custody for questioning about the kidnapping, Ms. Beccuau said. She did not identify them or provide details about their involvement, saying only that they were from different cities and had criminal records. They were not known to the police as being part of organized crime, she said.
Pascal Gauthier, the chief executiveof Ledger, wrote on social media Thursday that he was “deeply relieved.”
“Our top priority was always to allow law enforcement to do their jobs and protect the integrity of the investigation,” Mr. Gautier said. “We respected law enforcement requests around safeguarding critical details of the ongoing investigation and appreciated members of the press who did the same.”
Ledger, a prominent start-up valued at more than $1 billion, was founded in 2014 and has sold over six million units since then, according to the company’s website. It has over 700 employees in Europe, Asia and the United States, the company says.
Éric Larchevêque, another founder at the company and a known TV personality who has appeared on the jury of France’s equivalent of “Shark Tank,” expressed “immense relief and profound joy” on social media after the release of Mr. Balland and his wife.
Prosecutors are opening an investigation into charges of kidnapping and holding someone against his or her will as part of an organized gang in order to obtain something in exchange; acts of torture; and armed extortion. Those crimes can carry life prison sentences, Ms. Beccuau said.
The case echoed a similar one reported by French news media this month in which a man and his family were held hostage by a group that wanted to blackmail his son, a cryptocurrency influencer living in Dubai. They were released, but no arrests have been made in that case, according to news reports.
At this stage, investigators have not established any ties between the two cases, Ms. Beccuau said.
