An Garda Síochána (the Irish National Police) managed to penetrate one of 12 cryptocurrency wallets linked to the case of the high-level narcotics trafficker. According to a statement from the Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB), the agency successfully seized 500 BTC.
At the time of the operation, the value of the seized assets exceeded $35 million. This breakthrough was made possible through the collaboration of technical specialists from Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3).
Europol Support and the "Unbreakable" Code
For a long time, the funds in Collins' wallets were thought to be inaccessible due to the loss of his private keys.
Typically, losing a private key means a permanent lock on the funds, as modern cryptography makes "brute-forcing" a password statistically impossible. However, Irish investigators reportedly utilized resources from Europol’s headquarters in The Hague to perform a complex decryption.
According to The Irish Times, the cracked address is part of a cluster of 12 wallets collectively holding approximately 6,000 BTC. The former owner, Clifton Collins, is currently serving a five-year sentence for the cultivation and distribution of illegal substances.
Collins had previously claimed that all his passwords were printed on a single sheet of A4 paper, which had allegedly vanished without a trace.
The Mystery of the Fishing Rod Case
Blockchain analysts at Arkham tracked the movement of the 500 BTC to a Coinbase Prime address on March 24th. According to their data, the coins had remained dormant for over 10 years.
"Collins controlled 14 addresses with a total balance of 5,500 BTC," Arkham noted. At current market rates, that fortune is valued at over $394 million.
The backstory of how the keys were lost reads like a movie script. Investigators say Collins purchased the bulk of his Bitcoin in late 2011 and early 2012 using proceeds from his drug trade.
He hid the sheet of paper containing the codes inside the aluminum cap of a fishing rod case in a rented home. Following his arrest in 2017, the landlord cleared out the property and sent Collins' belongings to a landfill. Collins himself later claimed the rod case had actually been stolen even before the landlord began cleaning.
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