In a strange incident, German prosecutors seized 50 million euros ($ 60 million) in bitcoins from a fraudster, but a fundamental problem that they faced with a “password”. He did not receive the money because the captive did not give him the password.
In the description, prosecutors in the city of Kempten in the state of Bavaria announced that the man had been sentenced to nearly two years in prison and spent this prison term quietly, while police made repeated attempts to reach the code. Over 1,700 bitcoins.
“We asked him about that, but he didn’t say that,” Sebastian Maurer told Reuters on Friday. “He wouldn’t know.”
Digital wallet
Bitcoin is stored in an application known as a digital wallet and is protected by encryption. The password is used as a decryption key to unlock the wallet and access bitcoin, and if the password is lost, the user cannot open the wallet.
The fraudster was sentenced to more than two years in prison for secretly installing an application on other computers to use his energy in mining or bitcoin.
When he was imprisoned, his bitcoin savings amounted to a fraction of the present value. Bitcoin has grown over the past year, reaching a record $ 42,000 in January. According to its website, Quindisk, for cryptocurrency and blockchain, it traded at $ 37,577 on Friday.
But prosecutors said the man did not have access to the money.
