German police have just hit the jackpot after seizing nearly 50,000 bitcoins, currently worth around 2 billion euros. This confiscation, the largest on this crypto-asset ever carried out in Germany, is equivalent to that carried out in the United States in November 2021, after an investigation into the theft of 50,000 bitcoins stolen from the illegal black market Silk Road.
As German justice explains, this incredible seizure is linked to the operation of a site allowing the illegal downloading or streaming of films or series. It was Movie2k.to, accused of having distributed more than 880,000 pirated copies between 2008 and 2013.
More modest gains
This type of illegal site can be very profitable for its administrators, thanks in particular to the sale of advertising and subscription offers. But yet, their income is far from reaching these kinds of heights. In the T411 case, a site prosecuted in France active for around eleven years, the gains made by the administrators were estimated at 6 million euros.
If the seizure by the German police is so important, it is because the two people prosecuted in the Movie2k.to affair, a 40-year-old German and a 37-year-old Pole, invested their winnings wisely more than ten years in bitcoin, when the price of this cryptocurrency was much lower – a way of laundering income, suspects German justice.
The United States, a crypto “whale”
As the German media Stern points out, with 50,000 bitcoins, the seized wallet is one of the largest in the world. This confiscation places Germany in the wake of the United States, Washington having seized around 400,000 bitcoins in ten years.
In France, the Agency for the Management and Recovery of Seized and Confiscated Assets (Agrasc) reported in its latest annual report, published last summer, an “explosion of seizures of crypto-assets”. The latter concerned “310 files, an increase of 319% in seizures”, of assets “which have become a preferred vector of laundering for the most seasoned delinquents”.