Cannabis dealer loses €35M as police crack first of 12 bitcoin wallets

Following a historic bitcoin (BTC) seizure in the US last year that left bitcoiners wondering how it was done, the Irish police have now recovered 500 BTC that hadn't moved for 10 years.

Garda Síochána, Ireland's national police and security service, confirmed earlier this week that the Criminal Assets Bureau, supported by Europol's European Cybercrime Centre, seized the bitcoin, worth around $35 million, "which are the proceeds of crime."

While the police haven't provided any further details, The Irish Times reported that the wallet cracked was one of 12 BTC wallets uncovered by the police after arresting cannabis cultivator Clifton Collins in 2019. Collins was sentenced to five years in prison, while all 12 of his wallets, including the cracked one, contain around 6,000 BTC, worth $420 million today.

Arkham Intelligence data also shows that a wallet attributed to Collins moved 500 BTC two days ago after being inactive for ten years. All BTC were then sent to the Coinbase crypto exchange.

It took around seven years for the police to access the bitcoin on one of the wallets. The problem was that, after Collins was jailed, his landlord threw the man's belongings away, including a fishing rod case where the so-called seed words, printed on paper, were hidden. Seed words are a combination of 12–24 words that give access to a bitcoin wallet.

Now, the industry is wondering how the police managed to access one of the wallets and whether they'll be able to do this with the rest.

Garda Síochána has only revealed that Europol "provided critical support to Bureau investigators and analysts with the provision of highly complex technical expertise and decryption resources vital to the success of the operation." Some observers online speculate that police probably managed to brute-force the wallet's password.

In either case, this case adds to the growing list of bitcoin and crypto seizures by law enforcement. As reported by Cybernews in October 2025, the US Department of Justice (DOJ) seized billions worth of BTC from a suspected mastermind of an Asian scam network.

This case has also attracted attention because the DOJ didn't reveal how they accessed the wallets, since the suspect had the private keys.

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