TechFlow news: On March 25, according to Cointelegraph, Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) announced that, with technical support from Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), it had successfully cracked a Bitcoin wallet previously believed to have permanently lost its private key, seizing 500 BTC worth over $35 million.
The wallet belonged to convicted drug trafficker Clifton Collins. According to reports, Collins purchased approximately 6,000 BTC with proceeds from drug trafficking between 2011 and 2012, storing them across 12 wallets. He printed the private keys onto a single A4 sheet and concealed it inside the aluminum end cap of a fishing rod case at his rented residence. After Collins was arrested and imprisoned in 2017, his landlord cleared out his remaining belongings and discarded the sheet—causing the private keys to go missing.
On-chain intelligence platform Arkham data shows that the 500 BTC transferred in this incident have been moved to Coinbase Prime, with the associated address labeled “Clifton Collins: Lost Keys.” Arkham tracking indicates Collins holds a total of 14 addresses containing roughly 5,500 BTC, currently valued at over $391 million; the remaining wallets remain uncracked.
Earlier reports indicated that 500 BTC linked to Irish drug trafficker Clifton Collins—dormant for nearly a decade—had appeared in on-chain transactions.
