Four Dollars Took Away Four Years of Wealth
In recent weeks, multiple media outlets have reported a series of violent home-invasion robberies targeting crypto holders. Criminals have recently been disguising themselves as couriers, delivery workers, and drivers. They ring the doorbell, confirm your identity, and step inside as soon as the door opens.
The danger begins in that split second. Most victims do not even have time to react before they are pinned down, threatened, stripped of their phone, and forced under pressure to reveal passwords, seed phrases, or authorize transfers.
This is not an accident. It is one of the harshest realities in Web3. Four years of accumulated assets can be taken away by someone holding a tool worth only four dollars. How do you prevent a four-dollar weapon from taking everything you have built?
Who becomes a target?
Most wrench attacks are not random. Victims are often selected in advance.
They may not flaunt their wealth, yet they reveal enough signals without realizing it. A casual conversation at dinner about this year’s gains, opening a wallet interface in a café, appearing knowledgeable at a local Web3 event, or mentioning an overseas investment during small talk can be all it takes for someone nearby to conclude that you are wealthy and worth targeting.
In places with higher crime rates, this risk grows even further. Criminals rarely know whether you actually hold a large amount of crypto. They do not need to know. The mere impression of wealth is enough to motivate an attack.
The safest principle is still the oldest one: protect your privacy and do not invite unnecessary attention. Keep your assets vague to outsiders and give no one a reason to take interest in your value.
When the wrench is already pointed at you, what choices remain?
A wrench attack is not about bravery. It is about whether you designed an exit in advance. If danger becomes real, your life always comes first.
Self-custody is not meant to make you resist at all cost. It is meant to ensure that if you are forced to surrender something, doing so will not destroy your entire net worth.
Two approaches have proven effective in real incidents.
1. Decoy wallets with a passphrase
By adding a passphrase on top of your existing seed phrase, you can maintain both a surface wallet and a hidden wallet at the same time. The wallet you use day to day should only hold an amount you are prepared to lose in an extreme situation, while your real reserves remain stored inside the hidden wallet.
In a coercion scenario, what you hand over is a wallet with a reasonable balance, convincing enough to appear complete, rather than your true savings.
You can take this one step further by setting up on chain monitoring for the decoy wallet. If those funds move, your family or trusted contacts can be alerted immediately that you may be in danger.
There is a practical issue many people overlook. Passphrases are often long and complex, not simple numeric strings, and can be difficult to recall under pressure.
With OneKey hardware wallets, different PIN codes can be bound to different passphrases. Each PIN then corresponds to a separate wallet environment. Entering one PIN opens the surface wallet. Entering another PIN opens the corresponding hidden wallet.
The entire process works without requiring you to type the full passphrase, while preserving the same level of isolation.
OneKey users can follow this guide to implement passphrases safely.
2. Multisig and distributed control
Recent cases show that even with a hidden wallet, a determined criminal may continue to apply pressure until more secrets are revealed. The real protection comes from ensuring that no one can access all of your funds in a single step.
The core value of multisig lies here.
With a well designed multisig structure, large holdings are no longer controlled by a single seed phrase, device, or physical location. Instead, funds can only be moved through joint authorization. Even if you are forced under pressure to surrender the portion you control, it is still insufficient for anyone to immediately transfer your assets.
A more mature approach is to distribute both permissions and locations at the same time. Signature authority can be spread across different cities, family members, or trusted parties, using different storage methods. This significantly reduces the risk of a complete compromise.
On top of this, it is possible to introduce a layered buffer model to hedge against extreme scenarios. In real world security design, very few systems rely on a single line of defense. Effective protection almost always depends on multiple layers that degrade risk step by step.
The same logic applies when facing a four dollar wrench attack. You do not need to reveal every card at once. Instead, a tiered structure ensures that each permission you are forced to give up only exposes part of the system.
For example, Attach to PIN allows different wallets to exist behind different PIN codes. When combined with a shallow multisig layer, you can create a structure that appears to hold core assets, while in reality it lacks the authority to move your true reserves.
When an attacker believes they have already succeeded, your actual core holdings are still isolated in another layer that remains out of reach.
Security is a system, not a single trick
Compared with exchange failures, project collapses, or smart-contract exploits, the financial damage from physical attacks is not the largest. But offline threats carry a far more terrifying risk. They target your life, not just your wallet.
When a four-dollar tool is pressed against your throat, the strongest protocols and the safest hardware cannot protect you unless you prepared the structure beforehand.
No one wants to face such a moment. Only those who prepare in advance can protect what matters most when the situation turns dire.
May you never encounter this danger. If you do, may your system be strong enough to let you walk away safely.
Save this article if you find it useful, and share it with the people you truly trust, the ones you would rely on when everything is at stake.
