Gate News reports that on March 25, the Irish Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) announced that with technical support from Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, they successfully cracked a Bitcoin wallet previously believed to have lost its private key permanently, seizing 500 BTC valued at over $35 million.
The wallet belonged to convicted drug dealer Clifton Collins. Between 2011 and 2012, Collins used drug proceeds to purchase approximately 6,000 BTC, stored across 12 wallets, with the private keys printed on an A4 sheet of paper hidden inside an aluminum end cap of a fishing rod case at his rented residence. After Collins was arrested and imprisoned in 2017, the landlord discarded the paper during cleanup, and the private key was lost.
On-chain intelligence platform Arkham data shows that the 500 BTC transferred this time has been moved to a certain CEX, with the related address labeled “Clifton Collins: Lost Keys.” Arkham tracking indicates Collins owns 14 addresses holding about 5,500 BTC, currently worth over $391 million, while the remaining wallets are still awaiting cracking.
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