The officials of Germany have recently seized a digital wallet that was assumed to carry $60 million in bitcoins; all these bitcoins were acquired through fraudulent online activity.
Bitcoin has many excellent apparent benefits, like the ability to be anonymously controlled and securely transferred. But cybercriminals used bitcoins frequently for all kind of fraudulent activities.
But in this case, the main problem is that the experts can’t unlock the wallet because the attacker is not revealing the password to the officials.
The man was sentenced to jail due to his die-hard silence, as the officials found the man unresponsive throughout the whole interrogation.
“The prosecutor in the Bavarian town of Kempten affirmed that the police officials had made several efforts to crack the code so that they can obtain access to more than 1,700 bitcoins, but they failed in every attempt.Â
Where’s the password?
Bitcoins are always stored on software that are known as a digital wallet, and it has been secured through encryption. In every case, a password is used as a decryption key to open the wallet and to access the bitcoin.
If the user lost the password or forget it, then the user cannot open the wallet anymore. But in this case, the culprit is not giving the password to the officials, and he has been stick to his words of not revealing the password.
However, the fraudster had been sentenced to jail for more than two years for covertly installing software on others’ computers to control their power so that he
can “mine” or produce bitcoins illegally.
When he was taken to jail, all his stored bitcoin would have been worth a fraction of the current value, which is around $37,400, according to the Coindesk portal.
It has seen a significant increase in recent month, approaching a record high of $42,000 in January. While apart from this, if the authorities do gain access to the wallet, the bitcoins would be sold and the cash would directly go into the state treasury.
This will happen because, all these bitcoins were not stolen from any particular person, rather it was freshly mined with all hacked computing methods and power.
Here, the officials have gained access to the wallet, but they have gained only 86 bitcoins that were not guarded by a password.
Moreover, the government can’t manage to gain access to the remaining 1,700 bitcoins; but, the officials also asserted that the original owner would even not able to access them, either.
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