A cannabis dealer had forfeited bitcoins worth around $3M after seizing the Irish Criminal Assets Bureau. But a bigger cache of 6,000 BTC that belongs to him, around $200M at the current price, are still inaccessible to the Bureau.
Clifton Collins, a Cannabis dealer, has forfeited bitcoins around $3M that were previously seized by Ireland’s Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB). Collins allegedly has two bitcoin caches. He complied with the smaller cache’s confiscation in Bray Circuit Court by the end of December when the Bureau told a judge it had sold the cryptocurrency.
Collins began harvesting cannabis around 2005. He rented properties in Ireland, along with a house in Galway, to grow hi marijuana crops. He then harvested, packaged, and sold them to Dublin. He used the revenue to buy Bitcoin in 2011 and early 2012. The police ultimately arrested him in Galway in 2017, caught some of his Bitcoins, and was sentenced him to five years in jail. The CAB told Collins that he cannot keep his coins and that the state has a claim on them since they were bought from the proceeds of crime.
CAB’s lawyers were given an order by the end of December to confiscate the money from Collins’ 89 bitcoins’ sale, together with cash and assets from his cannabis houses’ profits. The publication commented:
“Collins handed over a ‘mnemonic’ key containing 85 bitcoins and a code for another 4 he had given to his father shortly after his arrest.”
Justice Alex Owens allowed the sale of the 89 Bitcoins after concerns were raised about hacking and the high fluctuation of the cryptocurrency price. Sergeant Pat Lynch told the judge that Collins recognized that the bitcoins were the proceeds of crime and that he had no objection to them being sold.
But there is another stash of 6,000 BTC, which the Bureau believed it has seized, although it still does not have access to. Now the stash amounts to $200M.
Right after his arrest, Collins told the CAB that the needed information to access the coins was written on a piece of paper and hidden in a fishing rod, which he mentioned was in the Galway house. He directed CAB officers to look for the fishing rod, but when the police went to look for it, it was missing, and nobody else knew its whereabouts.
Numerous theories eventually emerged of where the rod might be, along with it was that it was stolen in an alleged break-in at the property, sent to a waste incinerator in China after the landlord cleared the house, or it has been misplaced in other ways. But according to the news, the CAB believed that it is only a matter of time before computer advances will enable them to get through the 6,000 BTC.
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