FameEX Hot Topics | The Irish Criminal Assets Bureau is also unable to sell the $378 million in seized Bitcoin

It is reported that the Irish Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) seized and seized a batch of Bitcoins in 2019, which were stored in 12 Bitcoin wallets, but unfortunately, the CAB failed to successfully obtain the keys of the relevant wallets from the criminals. Therefore, to this day, the Irish Criminal Assets Bureau still cannot get hold of these Bitcoins and sell them to the market.

The CAB stated that these Bitcoins were seized from a drug dealer in 2019, who claimed that the relevant seed phrases had been lost in a burglary. In 2020, the Irish High Court ruled that these Bitcoins were criminal activity assets and subsequently confiscated them. These Bitcoins were worth about $56 million at the time.

Although the police asked the drug dealers to hand over the Bitcoins to the CAB and issued a freezing order against them to prevent them from being transferred. But according to a recent article in The Irish Times, the CAB has been unable to access these bitcoins for the past four years, during which time the price of Bitcoin has risen from $9,000 to the current level of over $62,000, with a total value of $378 million.

Bitcoin seized from criminal activities has proven to be one of the biggest sources of selling pressure in the crypto market. Earlier this year, the German government's seizure of a total of $2.9 billion worth of Bitcoin caused a stampede-like panic sell-off at the time. The United States is then preparing to sell $4.4 billion worth of Bitcoin seized from Silk Road.

According to market statistics, countries currently have a large amount of crypto assets, and the potential sale of these tokens remains one of the important catalysts for the future downward trend of the crypto market.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this section is for informational purposes only, doesn't represent any investment advice or FameEX's official view.