A member of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) has successfully accessed a digital wallet containing around $6 million in cryptocurrency.
The wallet belonged to a person suspected of being involved in organised criminal activity.
AFP Commissioner Krissy Barrett spoke about the case during a recent National Press Club event. She explained that the police risked losing access to the wallet.
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If they had not found a way in before the suspect went to prison, he could have been released later with millions still under his control.
The breakthrough did not come from computers or encryption software, but from a data scientist working with the AFP’s Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce.
The analyst had been given an image showing numbers and words grouped into six-character blocks. There were more than 50 different groupings. While these appeared to be randomly generated, the officer suspected they had been manually altered.
Barrett said the data expert noticed that the sequence did not feel like a machine-generated code. Instead, it looked like someone had changed it, possibly to hide the real access details.
Acting on a hunch, the analyst removed the first number in each group. What remained was a valid 24-word recovery phrase.
This allowed the police to access the wallet. Barrett said this case shows that human reasoning can succeed where technology falls short.
Meanwhile, five individuals were recently arrested by London’s Metropolitan Police in connection with a suspected cryptocurrency scam. How did the case unfold? Read the full story.
