Irish authorities have unlocked a third batch of 500 Bitcoin from the once inaccessible fortune of convicted drug trafficker Clifton Collins, in what has become one of the most closely tracked law enforcement recoveries on the blockchain this year.
The Criminal Assets Bureau (CAB) confirmed the seizure in an official statement on Facebook and a post on X on July 2, stating that the latest 500 BTC, valued at approximately €27 million (~$30.91 million), was identified as proceeds of crime. The bureau said the recovery brings its total Bitcoin seizures in 2026 to 1,500 BTC, currently valued at over €80 million (~$90 million), all tied to the same case.
The bureau credited Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre for its role in the operation. According to the statement, Europol hosted operational meetings at its headquarters in The Hague and supplied highly complex technical expertise and decryption resources that proved vital to cracking the wallet. CAB added that it has no further comment to make at this time, and it has still not explained how investigators actually gained access.
Onchain trackers caught the move first
Blockchain analysts spotted the funds moving before the official confirmation landed. Lookonchain said in a July 3 post on X that another 500 BTC from the Collins-linked wallets had been deposited to Coinbase Prime, while roughly 4,500 BTC remained in wallets connected to the case.
Arkham’s entity page for Clifton Collins, which tags the addresses as “Clifton Collins: Lost Keys,” shows the pattern clearly. The transfer history lists a 500 BTC deposit worth $30.85 million to Coinbase Prime around 12 hours before the confirmation, a 500 BTC deposit worth $38.19 million to a Wintermute address a month earlier, and a 500 BTC Coinbase Prime deposit worth $35.44 million three months ago.
Before 2026, the wallets had sat dormant for roughly a decade, with the older entries on Arkham dating back ten years to when the coins were originally consolidated in 500 BTC blocks.
That sequencing matters. Each of the three recoveries this year has followed the same playbook: a long dormant 500 BTC wallet suddenly moves, the funds land at an institutional custody or trading venue, and CAB confirms a seizure shortly after.
The March recovery went to Coinbase, the May recovery routed through a Wintermute deposit address, and the latest batch has again landed at Coinbase Prime, suggesting the state is positioning the coins for eventual liquidation through regulated channels.
A fortune locked inside a fishing rod case
The Collins saga is one of the strangest stories in Bitcoin’s history. Collins, a former beekeeper from Dublin who ran a cannabis growing operation across rented houses in Ireland, bought roughly 6,000 BTC in late 2011 and early 2012 using drug proceeds, when the asset traded for just a few dollars per coin.
To secure the stash, he split it across 12 wallets holding 500 BTC each, printed the private keys on paper, and hid them inside the aluminium cap of a fishing rod case at a rented property in County Galway. After his arrest and five-year prison sentence in 2017, the property was cleared out, and the fishing gear was believed to have been dumped, with the waste reportedly sent abroad for incineration.
The Irish High Court ordered the forfeiture of the 6,000 BTC to the state in 2020, but the coins were considered permanently unreachable.
As The Crypto Times reported in 2024, CAB openly admitted at the time that the missing private keys had left it unable to access the fortune, which had swelled to hundreds of millions of dollars, while it held out hope that technological advances might one day unlock the funds.
That hope materialized in March this year, when CAB and Europol cracked the first wallet and moved 500 BTC worth around $35 million. A second wallet followed in May, and the latest seizure now makes it three of the 12.
What comes next for the remaining 4,500 BTC
The unanswered question is the method. Neither CAB nor Europol has disclosed how the wallets were opened, saying only that decryption resources were involved. Analysts have floated two main theories: weak passwords on the original wallet files that yielded to brute force attacks, or flaws in the early key generation process that allowed cryptographic reconstruction.
Either way, the fact that three wallets from the same batch have now fallen in quick succession suggests investigators have a repeatable technique rather than a one-off stroke of luck.
If that holds, the remaining nine wallets holding around 4,500 BTC, worth more than $275 million at current prices, are likely on borrowed time. A full recovery would make the Collins case the largest asset seizure in CAB’s history and one of the most valuable crypto recoveries by any European agency.
The case also carries a broader signal for the market. Bitcoin long presumed lost is not necessarily lost forever, and dormant supply assumptions built into onchain models may need revisiting as state-level decryption capabilities improve.
For law enforcement, the Collins recoveries have become a template for combining court-ordered forfeiture, international cybercrime support, and public blockchain tracing, with every step visible in real time to anyone watching the chain.
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