🕗 It was twenty past eight on a Tuesday morning in Paris.
Pierre Noizat, CEO of French cryptocurrency platform Paymium, was going about his day. Elsewhere in the city, his daughter, 34 years old and five months pregnant, was walking her two-year-old son to the school gate with her husband. Ordinary neighbourhood. Ordinary morning.
🚐 A white van pulled up alongside them.
It had the branding of a well-known delivery company on the side.
Nothing to look at twice.
🎭 Three masked men jumped out.
They grabbed the woman.
They beat her husband to the ground with blunt objects.
They tried to force her and the child into the van.
She fought back. Five months pregnant, she wrestled a replica pistol from one of her attackers and threw it into the street.🧯 A stranger heard the screaming and sprinted across with a red fire extinguisher.
The attackers fled.
Her husband escaped with a few stitches.
The child was unhurt.
Noizat later described his son-in-law and the man with the fire extinguisher as heroic. He was right.
But it was something else he said that has stayed with me.
“We’re dealing with a phenomenon that’s not going to be limited to cryptocurrency entrepreneurs.”
If you advise prominent families in the UK, that sentence deserves your full attention.
🧠 The Assumption at the Heart of Most Security Arrangements
There is an assumption that quietly underpins most security arrangements for wealthy and prominent individuals.
The assumption is that the principal is the target.
Everything flows from that logic.
• The principal gets assessed.
• The principal gets protected.
• The monitoring, the close protection, the estate security — all of it organised around the person at the centre.
For many threat scenarios, that is perfectly reasonable.
But there is a category of threat where it fails entirely.
Where the principal was never the intended point of attack.
Where the plan, from the very beginning, was to go around them.
To get to someone they love.
📍 Paris Was Not a One-Off
Paris was not a single incident.
It was the most visible moment in a pattern that had been building for months.
Earlier that same year, the co-founder of Ledger, one of Europe’s most prominent technology firms, was taken from his home in the early hours with his wife.
They were separated and held in different locations whilst kidnappers demanded a ransom from his business partner. Part of it was paid before the police intervened.
When he was found, his hand had been mutilated.
A father was kidnapped and held for days.
A mother and daughter were locked in a garage.
A man had a finger severed.
In each case, the logic was identical.
The principal, the wealthy individual, was too difficult to reach directly.
Too well protected, or simply too unpredictable in their movements.
So the attackers went around them.
Families are softer targets.
They frequently have no protection at all.
They have routines.
• School runs
• Morning walks
• Regular coffee shops
• The same streets
• The same times
• The same days
They are also, of course, the thing that matters most.
Which is precisely what makes them so useful as leverage.
🌍 Why This Matters in the UK
It would be easy for advisers working with UK families to look at those cases and conclude they belong to a different world.
- Cryptocurrency.
- France.
- A particular strain of organised crime.
I would push back on that.
The use of family members as leverage is not confined to one country or one industry.
It has appeared across sectors, borders, and very different levels of visible wealth.
It is spreading because it works.
And the people behind it are not improvising.
They are patient, organised and methodical.
What makes this directly relevant for the families you advise is that the principal may have done everything right.
- Low profile.
- Discreet lifestyle.
- No social media presence worth speaking of.
But their daughter still collects the children from the same school gate at the same time every afternoon.
Their son still trains at the same gym on the same mornings.
Their spouse still takes the same route through the same park.
⚠️ Routines are intelligence.
Predictable family members are a vulnerability.
And the people who understand that are already paying attention.
🛡️ Why Security Must Include the Whole Family
This is why, when we work with a client at Defuse Global, we involve the whole family, not just the principal.
That is not simply a logistical decision.
It reflects how targeted attacks actually unfold.
Ask yourself something straightforward.
How would it feel to have a dedicated close protection team around you and your family, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?
The honest answer, for most families, is that it would be claustrophobic, intrusive and deeply unpleasant.
It would change the texture of daily life in ways that few people would willingly accept.
So why would that ever be your first position?
It shouldn’t be.
Close protection is the last resort, the final layer of a much broader approach.
Treating it as the default answer is rather like waiting until the last twenty seconds of a crisis before deciding to act.
Sensible, proportionate security starts long before anyone puts a team in the field.
It starts with understanding:
- where and how a family is vulnerable
- what a targeted attack against them might look like
- what early steps can quietly reduce that risk without disrupting daily life
🛡️ Why Security Must Include the Whole Family
This is why, when we work with a client at Defuse Global, we involve the whole family, not just the principal.
That is not simply a logistical decision.
It reflects how targeted attacks actually unfold.
Ask yourself something straightforward.
How would it feel to have a dedicated close protection team around you and your family, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?
The honest answer, for most families, is that it would be claustrophobic, intrusive and deeply unpleasant.
It would change the texture of daily life in ways that few people would willingly accept.
So why would that ever be your first position?
It shouldn’t be.
Close protection is the last resort, the final layer of a much broader approach.
Treating it as the default answer is rather like waiting until the last twenty seconds of a crisis before deciding to act.
Sensible, proportionate security starts long before anyone puts a team in the field.
It starts with understanding:
where and how a family is vulnerable
what a targeted attack against them might look like
what early steps can quietly reduce that risk without disrupting daily life
📞 A Conversation Is Often the First Step
If you advise a prominent family and something in this piece has prompted a specific thought — about a client, about someone around them, about an assumption that may not have been examined recently — that thought is worth a conversation.
These conversations are confidential, carry no obligation and are often more straightforward than people expect.
📞 Call us on +44 (0)207 293 0932
🌐 Visit www.defuseglobal.com
Philip Grindell is the founder and CEO of Defuse Global, a specialist threat investigation and crisis management consultancy, and the author of Personal Threat Management: The Practitioner’s Guide to Keeping Clients Safer.
