A 21-year-old Ukrainian cryptocurrency investor was tortured and burned alive in Vienna after being lured over his fortune. Danilo Kuzmin's body was discovered in a torched Mercedes, leading to the arrest of two Ukrainian suspects. Authorities suspect a financial motive tied to his crypto wallets.
Danilo Kuzmin, a 21-year-old Ukrainian student and son of Kharkiv deputy mayor Sergey Kuzmin, lived and studied in Vienna. He vanished after stopping responses to calls, prompting missing persons reports from his family and a close acquaintance.
On November 25, CCTV footage from the underground car park at the luxury Sofitel hotel captured several men surrounding Kuzmin, with witnesses noting a large blood stain in the stairwell. Investigators believe he was forced into the back seat of his family's Mercedes and driven to a garden area in Vienna's Donaustadt district.
There, the vehicle was set alight using petrol. Firefighters found his body in the backseat after extinguishing the flames; forensic experts determined it was about 80 percent burned, with massive blunt force trauma including head injuries and broken teeth. The cause of death was suffocation or heat shock. A melted fuel canister recovered from the scene was traced to a Vienna petrol station, where CCTV allegedly showed one suspect purchasing two cans prior to the killing.
Austrian police, working with Ukrainian authorities and Europol, identified two Ukrainian suspects aged 19 and 45. The younger suspect studied at the same university as Kuzmin. They were arrested in Odessa on November 29, a day after returning to Ukraine, with assistance from the KORD special unit. A court ordered their detention for 40 days.
Significant amounts disappeared from Kuzmin's cryptocurrency wallets around the attack time, and one suspect was found with a large sum of US dollars. Head of Vienna’s state criminal office, Colonel Gerhard Winkler, stated investigators assume a financial motive and have ruled out any political background. Ukrainian media reported Kuzmin was held in the vehicle for hours and tortured until revealing access codes for his accounts. The case will be prosecuted in Ukraine after Austria agreed to transfer it.
This incident echoes a separate case involving a Russian crypto millionaire and his wife, found encased in concrete in Dubai after a similar kidnapping over fortune.