The Irish Criminal Assets Bureau has unlocked a wallet containing 500 BTC worth over $35 million, with Europol’s support.
The Irish Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) announced Tuesday that it had gained access to and seized a Bitcoin wallet containing 500 BTC, valued at over $35 million. The operation was carried out with the support of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre, and concerns funds linked to Clifton Collins, a drug trafficker sentenced to five years in prison for the cultivation and sale of cannabis.
According to a report by the Irish Times, the wallet is one of 12 wallets that Collins allegedly used to store a total of 6,000 bitcoins, purchased between late 2011 and early 2012 with proceeds from drug trafficking. Collins had kept all the access keys on a single A4 sheet of paper, hidden inside the aluminium cap of a fishing rod case at his rented home.
Following Collins’ arrest in 2017 — when police searched his car and found a cannabis supply — the property owner cleared out the apartment and disposed of items left behind by the convicted dealer. Collins, however, claimed that the fishing rod case had been stolen before the landlord entered the property, making the wallet access keys apparently unrecoverable.
Blockchain intelligence platform Arkham had already labeled the wallet as “Clifton Collins: Lost Keys” and recorded the transfer of 500 BTC to Coinbase Prime on Tuesday, more than a decade after the coins were first deposited. Arkham lists Collins as the holder of 14 addresses with a total of 5,500 bitcoins, worth a combined value of over $391 million.
The CAB noted that “Europol hosted operational meetings at its headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands, and provided critical support to the Bureau’s investigators and analysts through highly complex technical expertise and decryption resources that were fundamental to the operation’s success.”
