German Police Secure $2 Billion In Bitcoin From Pirate Site Operators

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: With help from the FBI, German police managed to secure nearly 50,000 bitcoin (USD $2 billion) from the operators of the defunct movie streaming portal, Movie2k. Movie2K was another pirate site that showed an early interest in bitcoin. In its heyday, the site was the dominant pirate streaming portal in German-speaking countries. It generated a healthy revenue stream, part of it held in bitcoin. The operator of the site never got to spend most of it though. The site surprisingly shut down in the spring of 2013. Many suspected that legal troubles had plagued the site, something confirmed years later when Dresden police announced several arrests.

It was rare to see new activity in an already-dated dossier, but the biggest surprise followed later when the police announced that $29.7m in bitcoin had been secured from the site's operators. This 'seizure' was one of the largest of its kind but the authorities estimated that the operators had more bitcoin stashed away, much more. Today, new information released by Dresden police shows that the assumption was correct.

Following an investigation carried out by the Dresden General Prosecutor's Office, the Saxony State Criminal Police, and the local tax authority (INES), nearly 50,000 bitcoin were 'provisionally' secured earlier this month. The haul is worth more than $2 billion at today's exchange rate. Never before has this much bitcoin been secured by German authorities; it's also one of the largest crypto hauls worldwide. 'The Bitcoins were seized after the accused voluntarily transferred them to official wallets provided by the [Federal Criminal Police Office]. This means that a final decision has not yet been made about the utilization of the Bitcoins,' police write.

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