Australian police cracked a coded cryptocurrency wallet backup containing 9 million Australian dollars ($5.9 million).
Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett described the effort as “miraculous work” during a Wednesday speech, crediting a data scientist who has become known within the agency as a “crypto safe cracker.”
During an investigation into a purported “well-connected alleged criminal” who stockpiled cryptocurrency by selling “a tech-type product to alleged criminals,” the AFP came across password-protected notes on his mobile phone. Upon further examination, law enforcement also identified an image containing random numbers and words, Barrett said.
Barrett said the numbers were divided into six groups with over 50 combinations, and the AFP digital forensics team “determined it could be related to a crypto wallet.” The suspect allegedly refused to hand over the keys to his crypto wallet, an act that carries a 10-year penalty in Australia.
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“We knew if we couldn’t open the crypto wallet, and if the alleged offender was sentenced, upon release, he would leave prison a multi-millionaire, all from the profits of organized crime,” Barrett said. “For our members, that was not an acceptable outcome.”
How the code was cracked
One of AFP’s data scientists realized that the alleged criminal “tried to create a crypto booby prize in how the numbers were presented.” To decode the 24-word seed phrase, he had to remove the first number from each sequence.
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The data scientist explained that “some of the number strings felt wrong and they looked like they were not computer-generated.” He added that those strings “looked like a human had modified the sequence by adding numbers to the front of some sequences.”
This wasn’t the first crypto recovery for the AFP’s digital forensics team. In a separate case, the same unidentified data scientist helped recover more than $3 million in digital assets using another decoding technique.
In both cases, the crypto was seized by the AFP-led Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce. If the court orders the funds to be confiscated, the money will end up in a commonwealth account and redistributed by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to fund crime prevention.
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