Irish Drug Dealer Tells Police That Keys to $56M in Confiscated BTC Are Lost

Dubliner Clifton Collins, who was recently imprisoned for drug trafficking, claims that robbers took the keys to the $56 million in Bitcoin Irish High Court had ruled should be confiscated.

After obtaining more than 6,000 BTC by 2017, Collins decided to insure himself against hackers by distributing the cryptocurrency across 12 newly created accounts.

Thus, he transferred 500 BTC into each of them, the Irish Times reported on Feb. 21.

Collins then printed out the keys for all of his 12 BTC accounts onto a piece of paper, which he says he stored in an aluminium cap of his fishing rod case.

The fishing rod containing the keys for Collin's BTC account has ostensibly not been ever found.

Worth noting, a number of purported witnesses - including those who cleared the house, the landlord and those who helped Collins distribute his BTC across the new accounts - told the police the same details about what happened to the rented house and the fishing rod.

Infamous Canadian crypto exchange QuadrigaCX lost the keys for cold wallets holding $145 million in digital assets.

Following his death, neither officials, Cotten's wife nor the court-ordered monitor - Big Four audit company Ernst & Young - have been able to locate the keys.

The claim alleged that following Kleiman's death in 2013, Wright unlawfully appropriated more than a million BTC that the duo had mined jointly in the early years of the cryptocurrency, as well as some related intellectual property.

Eventually, Wright claimed that he did not have a key for the list of the BTC addresses that held deposited funds in an encrypted file.