A hacker was arrested by authorities in Germany for stealing millions of dollars worth of Bitcoin, but they aren’t able to access the stolen funds. In most similar cases, stolen funds are ceased upon the arrest of a bad actor, but this time the convicted hacker has kept silent about how to access his stash as he serves his prison sentence.
According to Reuters, German prosecutors have revealed that more than 50 million euros ($60 million) worth of Bitcoin was ceased from the fraudster, but the wallet cannot be unlocked as the hacker won’t reveal his password.
A prosecutor in the Bavarian town of Kempten noted that the accused have been serving his time in prison since his arrest and has remained silent throughout the entire time. In the meantime, the police have made multiple failed attempts to crack the code to the wallet.
“We asked him but he didn’t say,” prosecutor Sebastian Murer told Reuters on Friday. “Perhaps he doesn’t know.”
Cryptocurrencies are stored in digital wallets, which are highly encrypted and near to impossible to crack unless one has access to the wallet’s private keys, which functions as a password. When a password is lost the user cannot open the wallet. This heightened security is one of the pros when it comes to safely storing one’s funds, but in this case, it is an obstruction.
The 29-year-old hacker was arrested and convicted back in 2014 for computer fraud among other charges. He stealthily installed crypto-jacking malware on people’s computers to mine bitcoin. He was sentenced to more than two years in Prison.
According to local media reports, authorities had seized more than 1,800 BTC at the time of his arrest and were able to sell 86 bitcoins from the stolen funds for about 500,000 euros ($602,452). A spokesperson for the Kempten district court had noted the rest of the bitcoins were protected by multiple passwords and IT specialists have been unable to crack it.
Billions in Crypto Seized
As previously reported by The Daily Chain, The US, Canada, and Bulgaria coordinated law enforcement agency recently arrested a Netwalker Ransomware attacker from Canada. In the process, the authorities were also able to recover $454,000 in crypto acquired from extortion activities.
Last year, over $4 billion worth of crypto assets were seized by Chinese police from seven convicts involved in the PlusToken scam, a multinational pyramid network that originated in China.
