The assailants blindfolded him and took him away in one of their cars.
"I was in the back seat, and there were two people pressing my head down," the 36-year-old said. "They were telling me they were from the army and they were taking me to a torture house."
His captors said they were seeking a ransom -- but not cash.
"We know you have been doing cryptocurrencies and you have a lot of money, and we want you to transfer $500,000," Ivaibi, the founder of the cryptocurrency educational hub Mitroplus Labs, remembers his kidnappers saying.
They took two of his iPhones, which gave the perpetrators access to $120,000 worth of the stablecoin tether and $18,000 worth of Mitroplus Lab's meme coin, afro token. He got glimpses of his captors when they would remove his blindfold and use his full face to unlock his phone and access his crypto accounts.
"The gun was, most of the time, pointed near my thigh, and sometimes at my head," he said.
After a little over five hours, the perpetrators left him about 11 miles from his home. Stranded just after midnight with no money, no phone and no car, Ivaibi was able to stop a motorcycle taxi and pleaded for the man to help him.
Ivaibi had been the victim of a classic crime with a modern twist: crypto kidnapping. It's been around for nearly a decade but has become increasingly common in recent years as the value of cryptocurrencies has soared and facial recognition technology has allowed assailants easy access to victims' phones.
In a review of news reports and legal documents, NBC News identified 67 incidents of crypto kidnapping involving a target or their family member in 44 countries, on every continent except Antarctica.
Crypto-related abductions increased every year since 2019, the NBC News analysis found. In 2024, NBC News identified 17 instances of cryptocurrency-related kidnappings, the highest reported number in the last decade. 2025 has already seen that many reported cases.
Crypto kidnappings attracted attention in the U.S. in May when two men were arrested for allegedly kidnapping and torturing a man inside his home in New York City in an attempt to steal his bitcoin.
The kidnappings are part of a wider category of incidents known as "wrench attacks" -- when perpetrators attack their victims in the real world as a means of acquiring their cryptocurrencies. The term "wrench attack" comes from a comic where two figures talk about stealing someone's cryptocurrency by hitting them with a "$5 wrench."
NBC News identified over 150 alleged wrench attacks worldwide in the past decade and spoke to three individuals who shared their personal experiences. In these examples, perpetrators attempted to obtain the victim's cryptocurrency through home invasion, extortion, blackmail, armed robbery, swatting, assault or even murder.
When Rocelo Lopes received a call from an unknown number in the middle of his workday, he thought it was a scam. But when they called a second time, he picked up and heard his wife's voice through the receiver. He realized something was wrong.
Lopes' wife had been kidnapped in broad daylight in the Brazilian city of Florianópolis after dropping their daughter off at school. Her captors held her in an apartment in the East Zone of São Paulo, an area overtaken by the Capital's First Command, the largest criminal network in the country. They demanded that Lopes hand over his cryptocurrencies.
"We don't want f-----g reais," they told Rocelo over the phone, referring to Brazil's currency. "We want it in coins, in cryptocurrencies, understand?"
He appeared in local newspapers and television programs that said he made "a fortune manufacturing bitcoin," which he now believes put a target on him and his family.
"Most people in the cryptocurrency space, with the intention of making everyone use it, with the intention of promoting it,end up making a very serious mistake," Lopes said,"and that is to expose themselves."
His wife's kidnapping coincided with a monumental year for bitcoin. The cryptocurrency had hit what at the time was an all-time high of $20,000 and debuted on CME, the world's largest futures exchange. A single bitcoin was worth about $117,000 as of Friday.
Marilyne Ordekian, a doctoral candidate at University College London who co-authored a study on wrench attacks, said her research found a direct correlation between the number of attacks and the rise and fall of the price of bitcoin. A report from the blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis had similar findings.
The BBC reported in May that 20 people were arrested in France in connection with a string of cryptocurrency-related kidnappings. This year, David Balland, a co-founder of the French crypto-wallet firm Ledger, was kidnapped along with his wife.
As the price of bitcoin continues to reach all-time highs, hitting over $120,000 this month, more attacks are projected to come.