The Research Happens Long Before the Approach
The Incident Is Never Where The Story Actually Starts
By the time an approach happens, the point where it could still have been prevented has usually already passed.
A Control Risks report published in July found that recorded kidnappings were 60% higher in 2025 than in 2020, with mass kidnappings, five or more victims in a single incident, up 154% over the same period. A separate study of executive-targeting incidents found that attacks on non-CEO executives have risen more than 200% since 2023, and that in the large majority of cases, online reconnaissance preceded the physical approach. The attacker had already built a picture: routines, locations, relationships, and, in cases involving cryptocurrency holders, a working estimate of what someone was worth, before they ever appeared in person.
Two Recent UK Cases Show Exactly How
The common thread isn't sophistication. It's patience.
In London, six men were convicted after torturing a group of cryptocurrency investors to force a payment, a case built substantially on the digital trail the attackers themselves had left in reaching their targets. In Hertfordshire, five people were sentenced for a similar so-called "wrench attack", the blunt, low-tech kidnap-and-coerce method now closely associated with cryptocurrency holders specifically because their wealth is both visible and instantly transferable.
Someone found a target through what had already been made visible: a location tagged in a post, a lifestyle implied by a photo, a professional profile that made a person's worth, or a family's, easy to estimate from outside. None of that required breaking in anywhere. It required only looking, and enough time.
Where The Useful Intervention Actually Sits
The earliest, and cheapest, control is limiting what's there to find.
Physical measures, close protection, secure transport, residential security, still matter and are not going anywhere. But they respond to a threat that has already taken shape. The earlier control is understanding what a family's or an executive's digital footprint actually shows a stranger doing an hour of research, and whether it shows more than it needs to.
For organisations, that means treating a senior leader's public visibility as a security question as well as a communications one, and reviewing what a determined outsider could learn about their routine, their family, and their assets from openly available sources alone. For private families, it means the same discipline applied more personally: understanding what is currently visible about property, travel, and children, well before deciding whether anything further is required.
None of this is about disappearing from public life. Most people we work with have no wish to, and for many it would not be realistic. It is about knowing, specifically, what is currently visible, and deciding deliberately what stays that way. The kidnappings and extortion cases making headlines this year did not begin with the incident. They began with research that was allowed to happen, because nobody had looked at the picture from the other side.