German authorities efficiently confiscated 50,000 Bitcoin, valued at $2.17 billion, in mid-January from a piracy web site, in accordance with a Jan. 30 assertion from the Saxony Police.
The seizure is linked to an ongoing investigation into suspected unauthorized industrial exploitation of copyrighted works beneath the Copyright Act and subsequent industrial cash laundering. The Federal Prison Police Workplace (BKA), the FBI, and an undisclosed IT firm from Munich are collaborating within the investigations.
In accordance with the authorities, two unnamed suspects, together with a 40-year-old German and a 37-year-old Polish man, have been recognized. One in every of them voluntarily transferred the flagship digital asset to addresses offered by BKA.
In the meantime, this marks essentially the most in depth asset seizure by the German police, and the authorities are but to find out how the seized Bitcoin will likely be utilized.
Notably, this isn’t the primary time German authorities have seized Bitcoin. In 2022, they confiscated roughly €23 million value of the highest digital asset after dismantling the server infrastructure of the illicit darknet market Hydra.
Drawing parallels, the U.S. authorities has additionally undertaken important seizures of the highest cryptocurrency. Over 50,000 BTC, valued at $3.6 billion, linked to the defunct darknet market, Silk Highway, had been seized from James Zhong lately.
The U.S. has additionally been actively divesting its BTC holdings. On Jan. 25, the federal government revealed plans to promote $130 million of the cryptocurrency.
Regardless of this promoting exercise, knowledge from the Arkham Intelligence platform signifies that the U.S. authorities nonetheless holds greater than 216,000 models of BTC, valued at $9.56 billion as of press time.
