German police confiscate $ 60 million in bitcoins ... But what is the password?
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| German police confiscate $ 60 million in bitcoins |
The fraudster was found guilty of more than two years in prison for secretly installing an application on other computers to harness its energy in mining or producing Bitcoin.
German prosecutors confiscated 50 million euros ($ 60 million) in Bitcoin, but there is one problem: They cannot get the money because they don't have the password.
Prosecutors in the city of Kempten, in the state of Bavaria, said that a fraudster was sentenced to prison and spent his prison term in silence, at a time when the police made repeated unsuccessful efforts to break the code to reach more than 1,700 bitcoins.
"We asked him about her, but he did not say," Sebastian Maurer told Reuters on Friday. "He may not know."
The bitcoin is stored in an application known as a digital wallet, and it is secured by encryption. The password is used as the decryption key to unlock the wallet and access Bitcoin. If the password is lost, the user cannot open the wallet.
The fraudster was convicted of more than two years in prison for secretly installing an application on other computers to harness its energy in mining or producing Bitcoin.
When he was imprisoned, his Bitcoin savings was worth a fraction of the present value. Bitcoin rose over the past year, reaching a record $ 42,000 in January. It traded at $ 37,577 on Friday, according to CoinDesk, a cryptocurrency and blockchain website.
But the prosecutors asserted that the man did not have access to the money.