Hyundai Seoul Offices Cleared After Bomb Threat as Caller Demands 13 BTC Ransom

Two Hyundai Group buildings in Seoul were evacuated Friday after a caller threatened to detonate explosives unless paid 13 Bitcoin—about $1.1 million. The individual phoned police in the morning, warned of a blast at 11:30 a.m., and referenced a second device in Yangjae-dong if the demand wasn’t met. Special forces swept the buildings and found no explosives.

This incident aligns with a week-long pattern in South Korea: threats reportedly hit Samsung Electronics on Thursday and a major telecom on Wednesday. It’s unclear whether those cases involved crypto demands. Hyundai’s episode also fits a broader, recurring playbook: bomb threats tied to Bitcoin ransoms surfaced globally in 2018, drawing attention from the U.S. National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, and a 2020 case in Japan saw an attacker seek 40 BTC in exchange for not bombing churches and schools.

What stands out here isn’t the technology—it’s the misread of incentives. Extortionists still ask for Bitcoin because it settles fast and moves without banks. Yet Bitcoin’s traceable ledger has repeatedly helped investigators reconstruct payment flows and identify choke points when funds hit KYC’d venues. The demand size—13 BTC—signals opportunism as prices climb; when Bitcoin pushes to new highs, some criminals assume victims will pay quickly, while overlooking that heightened market visibility often brings sharper scrutiny and faster coordination between exchanges, analytics firms, and law enforcement. The result is a paradox: the same asset used to pressure victims can become the thread that unravels the scheme.

Businesses caught in these scenarios face more than a scare. Evacuations carry direct costs, disrupt operations, and create reputational noise even when no device exists. Security leaders increasingly need incident playbooks that treat crypto-extortion like any other critical threat: immediate coordination with police, rapid comms to staff, and preplanned engagement with on-chain monitoring partners to track, freeze, or flag any attempted movement of funds. The goal isn’t to out-crypto the attacker; it’s to tighten the time window in which a threat can be monetized.

Violent crime around digital assets has been headline-heavy this year as Bitcoin notched fresh highs. “Wrench attacks”—physical coercion to steal crypto—have climbed, with 65+ cases logged in a public database curated by Casa CTO Jameson Lopp. November alone saw a man storm a St. Petersburg-based crypto exchange, deploying airsoft grenades and a smoke bomb; the same week, a perpetrator in San Francisco impersonated a delivery driver, tied up a homeowner, and stole $11 million in crypto. Earlier this month, Austrian police arrested two suspects accused of beating a young man and setting him on fire in his car—investigators suggested greed tied to wallet withdrawals.

These events are not a referendum on Bitcoin’s utility so much as a reminder that incentives shape behavior. As institutions harden their operational responses and on-chain forensics continue to mature, the gap widens between perceived anonymity and actual risk for would-be extortionists. That gap tends to be where these schemes lose oxygen.