France shuts down Reacher, a stolen-data search engine tied to crypto kidnappings
- —Reacher indexed 730 million data records and handled over 3 million search queries
- —Its three administrators are 17-year-olds; trial is scheduled for January 2027
- —France recorded 90 crypto-related violent incidents between January and mid-August 2026
- —A January 2026 leak at Waltio exposed data on roughly 50,000 users
Why it matters: Data leaks remain the main driver of crypto kidnappings, and shutting Reacher does not fix the problem: a similar service, BrixHub, with 11 billion records is still online.
Source: Journal du Coin