Two men plead not guilty in violent New York crypto kidnapping case

Two men pleaded not guilty on Wednesday to charges they kidnapped a man for three weeks in Manhattan’s upscale SoHo neighborhood, shocked him with electric wires and dangled him over a staircase to try to get him to give up his bitcoin password.

John Woeltz, 37, and William Duplessie, 33, have been detained since their arrests last month on kidnapping and other charges. Both defendants face up to life in prison if convicted.

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

When the man refused to share his password, Duplessie and Woeltz began a series of brutal beatings over three weeks in a luxury townhouse until the man managed to escape, prosecutors said. Duplessie and Woeltz tied the man’s wrists, hit him on the head with a gun and threatened to kill his family, according to criminal complaints against the two men filed in court.

Justice Gregory Carro ordered the two defendants to be detained without bail at least until their next hearing on July 15.

Local media have called Woeltz 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.

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, according to security experts.