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The headline-grabbing tale of an Italian man who said he was kidnapped and tortured for weeks inside an upscale Manhattan townhouse by captors seeking his bitcoin highlights a dark corner of the cryptocurrency world: the threat of violence by thieves seeking digital assets.

The alleged attempted robbery is known as a “wrench attack.” It’s a name popularized by an online comic that mocked how easily high-tech security can be undone by hitting someone with a wrench until they give up passwords.

Wrench attacks are on the rise thanks in part to cryptocurrency’s move into mainstream finance, Phil Ariss of the crypto tracing firm TRM Labs said in a recent blog post.

“Criminal groups already comfortable with using violence to achieve their goals were always likely to migrate to crypto,” Ariss said.

Some of the crypto’s key characteristics help explain why wealthy individuals who hold a lot of digital assets can be ripe targets for such attacks.

Cryptocurrencies like bitcoin offer traders full control of their funds without the need for a bank or permission from a government to buy, sell or hold it. The trade-off is that if funds are lost or stolen, there can be no way to get them back.

Self-reliance is a key ethos of crypto. Securing and controlling one’s private keys, which are like passwords used to access one’s crypto holdings, is viewed as sacrosanct among many in the crypto community. A popular motto is “not your keys, not your coins.”

Transactions on the blockchain, the technology that powers cryptocurrencies, are permanent. And unlike cash, jewelry, gold or other items of value, thieves don’t need to carry around stolen crypto. With a few clicks, huge amounts of wealth can be transferred from one address to another.

In the case in New York, where two people have been charged, a lot of details have yet to come out, including the value of the bitcoin the victim possessed.

Stealing cryptocurrency is almost as old as cryptocurrency itself, but it’s usually done by hacking. North Korean state hackers alone are believed to have stolen billions of dollars’ worth of crypto in recent years.

In response to the threat of hacking, holders of a large amount of crypto often try and keep their private keys off the internet and stored in what are called “cold wallets.” Used properly, such wallets can defeat even the most sophisticated and determined hackers.

But they can’t defeat thieves who force a victim to give up their password to access their wallets and move money.

The case in New York is the latest in a string of high-profile wrench attacks. Several have taken place in France, where thieves cut off a crypto executive’s finger.

Experts suggest several ways to mitigate the threats of wrench attacks, including using wallets that require multiple approvals before any transactions.

Perhaps the most common way crypto-wealthy individuals try to prevent wrench attacks is by trying to stay anonymous. Using nicknames and cartoon avatars in social media accounts is common in the crypto community, even among top executives at popular companies.

After back-to-back explosions, SpaceX launched its mega rocket Starship again on Tuesday evening, but fell short of the main objectives when the spacecraft tumbled out of control and broke apart.

The 403-foot (123-meter) rocket blasted off on its ninth demo from Starbase, SpaceX’s launch site at the southern tip of Texas. Residents voted this month to organize as an official city.

CEO Elon Musk ‘s SpaceX hoped to release a series of mock satellites following liftoff, but that got nixed because the door failed to open all the way. Then the spacecraft began spinning as it skimmed space toward an uncontrolled landing in the Indian Ocean.

SpaceX later confirmed that the spacecraft experienced “a rapid unscheduled disassembly,” or burst apart. “Teams will continue to review data and work toward our next flight test,” the company said in an online statement.

Musk noted in a post on X it was a “big improvement” from the two previous demos, which ended in flaming debris over the Atlantic. Despite the latest setback, he promised a faster launch pace moving forward, with a Starship soaring every three to four weeks for the next three flights.

It was the first time one of Musk’s Starships — intended for moon and Mars travel — flew with a recycled booster. There were no plans to catch the booster with giant chopsticks back at the launch pad, with the company instead pushing it to its limits. Contact with the booster was lost at one point, and it slammed into the Gulf of Mexico in pieces as the spacecraft continued toward the Indian Ocean.

Then the spacecraft went out of control, apparently due to fuel leaks.

“Not looking great with a lot of our on-orbit objectives for today,” said SpaceX flight commentator Dan Huot. The company had been looking to test the spacecraft’s heat shield during a controlled reentry.

Communication ceased before the spacecraft came down, and SpaceX ended its webcast soon afterward.

The previous two Starships never made it past the Caribbean. The demos earlier this year ended just minutes after liftoff, raining wreckage into the ocean. No injuries or serious damage were reported, although airline travel was disrupted. The Federal Aviation Administration last week cleared Starship for another flight, expanding the hazard area and pushing the liftoff outside peak air travel times.

Besides taking corrective action and making upgrades, SpaceX modified the latest spacecraft’s thermal tiles and installed special catch fittings. This one was meant to sink in the Indian Ocean, but the company wanted to test the add-ons for capturing future versions back at the pad, just like the boosters.

NASA needs SpaceX to make major strides over the next year with Starship — the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built — in order to land astronauts back on the moon. Next year’s moonshot with four astronauts will fly around the moon, but will not land. That will happen in 2027 at the earliest and require a Starship to get two astronauts from lunar orbit to the surface and back off again.

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NEW YORK (AP) — A second cryptocurrency investor surrendered to police Tuesday in the alleged kidnapping of a man who said he was tortured for weeks inside an upscale Manhattan townhouse by captors seeking the password to access his Bitcoin account.

William Duplessie, 32, faces charges of kidnapping, assault, unlawful imprisonment and criminal possession of a weapon, according to police.

His arrest comes four days after the alleged victim — a 28-year-old Italian national — escaped, bloodied and barefoot, from a lavish townhouse where he said he had been severely beaten, drugged, shocked and threatened with death for nearly three weeks.

On Friday evening, hours after the man’s escape, the crypto investor John Woeltz was taken into custody and charged in the alleged kidnapping scheme.

It wasn’t immediately clear if Duplessie had an attorney who could speak for him. Court records didn’t list one. Woeltz’s attorney has declined to comment.

Authorities said the pair lured the victim into an eight-bedroom townhouse in Manhattan’s Soho neighborhood, one of the most expensive in the city, on May 6 to steal his Bitcoin fortune.

Over the next 17 days, the man told police he was bound by the wrists, shocked with electrical wires, pistol-whipped, cut on the leg with a saw and forced to smoke from a crack pipe. At one point, he said, he was dangled from the home’s top flight of stairs.

Believing he would soon be killed, the victim said he agreed Friday morning to give the men access to the password.

As the men went to retrieve his computer, the victim was able to escape from the home and flag down a traffic agent.

A search of the townhouse turned up a trove of evidence, prosecutors said, including cocaine, a saw, chicken wire, body armor, night vision goggles, ammunition and polaroid photos of the victim with a gun pointed to his head and a crack pipe in his mouth.

The victim was hospitalized with injuries to his wrists consistent with being bound, cuts to his face and other injuries, authorities said.

Duplessie is due to be arraigned in a Manhattan court on Tuesday afternoon.

NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street is rallying Tuesday as the roller-coaster ride created by President Donald Trump’s trade policies whips back upward, this time because of a delay for his tariffs on the European Union.

The S&P 500 was up 1.9% in its first trading since Trump said Sunday that the United States will delay a 50% tariff on goods coming from the European Union until July 9 from June 1. The European Union’s chief trade negotiator later said on Monday that he had “good calls” with Trump officials and the EU was “fully committed” to reaching a trade deal by July 9.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 646 points, or 1.6%, as of 1:32 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 2.3% higher. They’re on track to more than recover their losses from Friday, when Wall Street’s roller coaster dropped after Trump announced the tariffs on France, Germany and the other 25 countries represented by the European Union.

Such talks give hopes that the United States can reach a deal with one of its largest trading partners that would keep global commerce moving and avoid a possible recession. Trump reached a similar pause on his stiff tariffs for China earlier this month, which launched an even bigger rally on Wall Street at the time.

Caution still remains on Wall Street, of course, even if the S&P 500 has climbed back within 4% of its record after falling roughly 20% below the mark last month.

Talks don’t guarantee results, and a worry is that all the uncertainty caused by on-again-off-again tariffs could damage the economy itself by pushing U.S. households and businesses to freeze their spending and investments out of fear of what’s to come. Surveys have already shown U.S. consumers are feeling worse about the economy’s prospects and where inflation may be heading because of tariffs.

On Tuesday, though, optimism mostly ruled. The stock market’s gains accelerated after a report released by the Conference Board said confidence among U.S. consumers improved by more in May than economists expected.

It was the first increase in six months, and consumers’ expectations for income, business and the job market in the short term jumped sharply, though it still remains below the level that typically signals a recession ahead. About half the survey results came after Trump paused some of his tariffs on China.

Nvidia rallied 3.2% and was one of the strongest forces driving the market higher ahead of its profit report coming on Wednesday. It’s the last to report this quarter among the “Magnificent Seven” Big Tech companies that have grown so large that their stock movements dominate the rest of the market.

Nvidia has been riding a tidal wave of growth created by the frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology, but it is also facing criticism that its stock price has shot too high.

Informatica climbed 5.8% after Salesforce said it would buy the AI-powered cloud data management company in an all-stock deal valuing it at about $8 billion. Salesforce added 1.9%.

The gains were widespread, and more than 90% of the stocks within the S&P 500 were rising.

One of the outliers was AutoZone, which fell 4.6% following a mixed report on its performance for the three months through May 10. Its profit fell short of analysts’ expectations, though its growth in revenue was stronger than expected.

CEO Phil Daniele said both its DIY and commercial businesses did well domestically, but shifting moves in foreign-currency values put pressure on the retailer’s operations outside the United States. The U.S. dollar’s value has been swerving against other currencies because of uncertainty around Trump’s trade policies. And when the dollar weakens, it can mean each peso of sales made in Mexico is worth fewer dollars.

In the bond market, Treasury yields eased to take some of the pressure off the stock market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 4.44% from 4.51% late Friday. It had been rising last week, in part because of worries about the U.S. government’s rapidly increasing debt.

Yields have been climbing for bond markets around the developed world, particularly in Japan, where a recent auction of longer-term bonds found relatively few buyers. But analysts said worries eased a bit after Japan’s finance ministry sent a questionnaire to bond investors that they took as a signal of efforts to calm the market.

In stock markets abroad, European indexes mostly rose, while Asian indexes were mixed.

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AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.

Salesforce is buying AI-powered cloud data management company Informatica in an approximately $8 billion deal.

Informatica’s shareholders will receive $25 per share, a premium of about 11% from Friday’s closing price of $22.55.

The transaction will give Salesforce access to Informatica’s data management capabilities.

Informatica was taken private in 2015 by private equity firm Permira and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board for about $5.3 billion. It went public again in 2021.

“Joining forces with Salesforce represents a significant leap forward in our journey to bring ​​data and AI to life by empowering businesses with the transformative power of their most critical asset — their data,” Informatica CEO Amit Walia said in a statement on Tuesday. “We have a shared vision for how we can help organizations harness the full value of their data in the AI era.”

Robin Washington, president and chief operating and financial officer at Salesforce, said in a statement that the acquisition will look to take advantage of Informatica’s capabilities quickly, particularly in areas such as the public sector, life sciences, health care, and financial services. San Francisco-based Salesforce is set to report its quarterly financial results Wednesday after the bell.

Both companies’ boards have approved the deal, which is expected to close early in Salesforce’s fiscal 2027.

Shares of Salesforce rose slightly before the market open, while Informatica’s stock jumped 5.7%.

PARIS (AP) — For Novak Djokovic, this is a relatively easy call: He, like many players, thinks the French Open is making a mistake by eschewing the electronic line-calling used at most big tennis tournaments and instead remaining old school by letting line judges decide whether serves or other shots land in or out.

Plenty of sports, from soccer and baseball to the NFL, are replacing, or at least helping, officials with some form of high-tech replays or other technology. Tennis, too, is following that trend, except at Roland-Garros, where competition continues through June 8.

Even the longest-running and most tradition-bound of the majors, Wimbledon, is — gasp! — abandoning line judges and moving to an automatic system this year. The WTA and ATP added machine-generated rulings this season for tour events on red clay, the surface at the French Open. But Grand Slam hosts can do what they want, and the French tennis federation is keeping the human element.

Djokovic, the 24-time major champion scheduled to play his first-round match in Paris on Tuesday, understands why folks might prefer the way to keep things the way they were for more than a century in his sport. He gets why there could be an inclination to shy away from too much change in a world now drowning in cell phones and streaming and social media.

“You don’t want to give everything away to the technology, right? But if I have to choose between the two, I’m more of a proponent of technology. It’s just more accurate, saves time, and ... (means) less people on the court” said Djokovic, 38, who was disqualified from the 2020 U.S. Open for inadvertently hitting an official with a ball hit out of frustration between games.

That edition of the tournament in New York only placed line judges on its two largest courts, while others used an electronic setup, a nod to the COVID-19 pandemic. The Australian Open got rid of all line judges in 2021, a first at a tennis major; the U.S. Open did the same later that year.

The French Open remains a holdout, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

“Unless the players are unanimous and come to us and say, ‘We won’t play if there isn’t a machine’ ... then I think we’ve got a great future ahead of us to maintain this style of refereeing,” French federation president Gilles Moretton said, while boasting of the quality of his country’s officials.

Players don’t sound that adamant, although they tend to echo the opinion of 2023 U.S. Open champion Coco Gauff, who is 21: “I mean, I don’t know if it’s like the ‘Gen Z’ in me, but I think if we have the technology, we should use it.”

Still, there is some charm to be found in the choreography of players insisting a call was wrong and chair umpires climbing down for a closer look at a ball mark on the clay. Watch a day of TV coverage from Paris and odds are good that dance will take place — probably more than once.

“That’s what makes clay special, in a way — that you can always review the shots. ... Obviously, you can’t deny that electronic line-calling is the future, and everything is moving towards AI and artificial intelligence,” said Stefanos Tsitsipas, the runner-up to Djokovic at Roland-Garros four years ago. “But me, personally, I wouldn’t mind playing on clay with maybe the judgment of a human instead of a robot.”

No matter the form of officiating, there invariably are times when athletes — perhaps eyesight or faith strained by heat-of-the-moment tension and an eagerness to be correct — just won’t agree with a call.

That, in turn, can lead to extended arguments and sometimes a scene seen recently: A player grabs a cell phone from the sideline to snap a photo of a mark in a bid to prove, and win, a point.

Aryna Sabalenka, a three-time Slam champ and No. 1 women’s player, and Alexander Zverev, a three-time major finalist, did just that, although they weren’t the first. Back at the 2013 French Open, Sergiy Stakhovsky put down his racket and took a picture of where a ball had landed during a loss to Richard Gasquet; Stakhovsky said then he’d done it before.

“Linespeople mess up sometimes,” said 2023 Australian Open semifinalist Tommy Paul. “Automatic line-calling is going to mess up probably less.”

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AP Sports Writer Andrew Dampf in Rome contributed.

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Howard Fendrich has been the AP’s tennis writer since 2002. Find his stories here: https://apnews.com/author/howard-fendrich. More AP tennis: https://apnews.com/hub/tennis