A French tax officer in Bobigny abused internal government systems to profile crypto professionals, prison guards, judges, and billionaire Vincent Bolloré then sold that data to criminals.
Price tag: €800 for an attack carried out at a prison guard’s home in Montreuil.
Her appeal was rejected on January 6.
This case matters not because it’s rare but because it reveals a new attack vector.
🔓 The Shift in the Threat Model
Crypto holders usually fear:
Exchange hacks
Telegram doxxing
On-chain exploits
But this attack didn’t come from Web3.
It came from privileged access to state identity systems where a single query links:
Name
Home address
Phone number
Family structure
Capital gains and asset types
This is not doxxing.
This is institutional identity extraction.
📊 A Black Market With a Price List
French media uncovered an underground “menu”:
€30 vehicle registration lookup
€150 wanted-person database check
€250 illegal vehicle unblocking
France recorded 93 investigations into professional secrecy violations and 76 data diversion cases in 2024 alone.
Authorities call it the “Uberization” of state data access.
🧠 IRL MEV: Real-World Maximum Extractable Value
On-chain, MEV comes from seeing transactions first.
In real life, MEV comes from seeing identity graphs first then choosing the cheapest coercion path.
Once identity is exposed:
Cryptography no longer matters
Self-custody becomes a liability
Security shifts from math to physical force
A hardware wallet doesn’t help when attackers know your address.
⚖️ Crypto + Identity = Physical Risk
Crypto holders are uniquely exposed:
Assets can’t be frozen or reversed
Value transfers instantly
Reporting attacks can trigger tax scrutiny
France already removed home addresses of crypto executives from public registries in 2025.
But tax databases remain accessible to thousands of civil servants, with monitoring mostly after the damage is done.
🧨 The Coming Honeypot Problem
France’s draft 2026 budget proposes:
A 1% annual tax on crypto assets over €2M
Mandatory declaration of self-custodied and offshore holdings
Result?
A state-managed list of high-value crypto holders + addresses.
From a threat-model perspective, that’s a honeypot.
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