A CRYPTO drugdealer was awarded £1.1m by a judge after cops seized his Bitcoin that rocketed to ten times its value while he was locked up.
The embarrassing ruling could open the door to similar cases as crypto thugs try to claw back their illegal earnings.
The man – who has not been named – was jailed in Sweden in 2019 and forced to pay back the amount he had made in drug sales with the Bitcoin he had amassed.
The Swede admitted to buying the crypto with funds he received through illegal online drug deals and had to hand over his entire pot to pay the £100,000 fine (1.3m Swedish kronor).
But by the time Swedish authorities began selling all 36 Bitcoin, they had appreciated in value tenfold – meaning they only had to sell three Bitcoin to repay the man’s fine, according to The Telegraph,
Prosecutor Tove Kullberg, who had the man stripped of his virtual funds during his arrest, said there were “lessons to be learned” from the humiliating saga.
“The lesson to be learned from this is to keep the value in Bitcoin, that the profit from the crime should be 36 bitcoin, regardless of what value the bitcoin has at the time,” she said.
This comes as billions of pounds worth of cash in the form of crypto is being scooped up by hackers and scams across the world.
Brazen billionaire brothers Raees Cajee, 21, and Ameer, 18 fled South Africa in April after telling investors their company, Africrypt, had been hacked and all £2.5bn in crypto stolen.
But an investigation by cops found the brothers had sold their Lamborghini Huracan, and two luxury properties weeks before their disappearance and later wrote an oddly-worded email begging investors not to alert authorities because it would “delay” the retrieval of money.
Dr Ruja the “Cyrptoqueen” Ignatove is another case; she purloined $4billion by convicting investors to buy her new crypto called “OneCoin”, which turned out to be a pyramid scheme.
Meanwhile, North Korea is suspected to have carried out around $2billion worth of crypto hacks as they scoop up the coins to prop up Kim Jong-un’s failing state.
Because cyptocurrencies were relatively new at the time of the man’s arrest, there was no precedence in Swedish law on how to deal Bitcoin profits in court.
Kullberg hopes with education, these mistakes won’t be repeated in the future.
“I think we should probably invest in an internal education in the [prosecution] authority, as cryptocurrency will be a factor we’ll be dealing with to a much greater extent than we are today.
“The more we increase the level of knowledge within the organization, the fewer mistakes we will make.”
Cryptocurrencies have become a pressing concern for authorities across the world.
The UK government commission a task force to come with ways to keep such currencies out of the court system, according to cointelegraph.
