Chris Curl,
Editor
May 29, 2025
The scene feels like something out of a psychological thriller: A bloodied, barefoot man—desperate, disheveled, and clearly in agony—stumbling through the upscale streets of Manhattan’s NolIta neighborhood, begging a traffic cop for help.
That man was Michael Valentino Teofrasto Carturan, a 28-year-old Italian cryptocurrency millionaire. What he had just escaped wasn’t a movie set or a fever dream—it was real life. For 17 harrowing days, Carturan was held captive inside a five-story luxury townhouse on Prince Street. While most passersby would assume the $75,000-a-month rental was hosting champagne toasts and startup brainstorms, it had become the site of a calculated and gruesome campaign of torture.
Why? His Bitcoin.
Yes, Bitcoin—the decentralized digital asset that promised financial freedom and unshackled prosperity—has now become a motive for some of the most brutal crimes imaginable.
From Crypto Bros to Criminals?
At the center of this nightmare are two figures who could have easily been profiled in a Forbes list just a year ago: John Woeltz, self-styled “crypto king of Kentucky,” and his Miami-based associate, William Duplessie. Known for their lavish spending—$100,000 bar tabs at exclusive nightclubs, luxury apartments in SoHo, and business ventures that blurred the line between tech and indulgence—they painted the picture of crypto’s wilder side: a frat-boy Wall Street fantasy gone rogue.
But behind the VIP booths and Instagram-ready penthouses, prosecutors allege these men orchestrated a chilling scheme to forcibly extract Carturan’s cryptocurrency passwords through electric shocks, chainsaw wounds, and psychological torment. The plan was simple in theory: isolate, intimidate, and torture a fellow crypto investor into giving up access to his fortune.
It’s what the crypto world has started to call a “wrench attack”—because unlike a hacker trying to steal your crypto through software, these attackers bring a literal wrench (or worse) and threaten your life until you give it up.
And in this case, “worse” meant everything from being pistol-whipped and tased in water to being hung over a building edge, threatened with mutilation, and forced to smoke crack. It’s hard to imagine a more grotesque convergence of high-tech wealth and primal violence.
The Dark Side of Digital Wealth
Carturan’s estimated net worth? Around $30 million in Bitcoin. The digital kind of money that’s irreversible, untraceable, and—to those who think they’re above the law—irresistible.
Cryptocurrency promised its users security and control. But what it can’t do is protect your body from someone who wants your password badly enough to beat it out of you. That’s the harsh reality the crypto community is waking up to: when the only thing between a criminal and a fortune is you, then you become the target.
This wasn’t about some anonymous hacker in a hoodie; this was about real people, in a real penthouse, using real violence.
And here’s the kicker: this isn’t an isolated case. All over the world, crypto millionaires are being targeted—not by digital tricksters, but by gangs willing to use brute force. From France to New York, stories are piling up: kidnappings, mutilations, even threats to family members—all for a string of words known as a “seed phrase.”
The Legal Reckoning
As Carturan recovers from his ordeal, Woeltz and Duplessie are facing a different kind of confinement: jail cells, denied bail, and charges that could keep them behind bars for decades. Their trials may set a precedent for how the justice system addresses this new hybrid of white-collar and violent crime.
How To Protect Yourself
The Carturan case is a wake-up call—not just for crypto millionaires but for the entire digital finance community.
It forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: the same qualities that make cryptocurrency attractive to innovators and freedom-seekers also make it attractive to criminals. Permanence. Irreversibility. Pseudonymity. Combine that with the belief that everyone is their own bank, and you’ve got a system that sometimes forgets the most important vault isn’t digital—it’s human.
It’s time for the crypto world to grow up. That means investing not just in digital security, but in personal security. Multi-signature wallets. Vault systems that require two or more people to access. Security teams. Emergency protocols. Yes, it might feel like overkill—until you’re the one dangling over a balcony, begging for your life.
What happened in that SoHo townhouse wasn’t just a crime—it was a collision between the utopian ideals of decentralization and the brutal realities of human greed. And it’s a reminder that the future of money doesn’t just depend on tech. It depends on how we protect the people behind the passwords.
In the world of cryptocurrency, your wealth isn’t just on a ledger. It walks with you. Sleeps in your apartment. Boards the plane. Answers the door.
Let’s hope, after this, it does so a little more carefully.
Keep coming back,
Chris Curl
Editor, Daily Profit Cycle