Police found more than 50,000 stolen bitcoins in a popcorn tin kept in the bathroom of a resident of the US state of Georgia. This is reported by Daily Mail.

The cryptocurrency was stolen about ten years ago from the illegal marketplace Silk Road, which was closed by the FBI in 2013. 32-year-old James Chun pleaded guilty to the theft, from whom 50.6 thousand bitcoins were confiscated in 2021. At that time, their value was estimated at 3.3 billion dollars (about 200 billion rubles), but since then the price of bitcoin has fallen, and now they are worth only 852 million dollars (about 50 billion rubles).

As it turned out, ten years ago, the kidnapper registered nine accounts on Silk Road and sent many withdrawal requests from them, because of which the site repeatedly gave him the funds deposited into the account. He did this 140 times and then hid the loot in separate accounts. For a long time, the location of most of the stolen bitcoins was unknown.

In 2019, James Zhong called the police and reported the theft. He said that a lot of things were stolen from him, including a large amount in bitcoins. The figures he named attracted the attention of the tax service. After an investigation, a search warrant was issued at Zhong’s home.

In the man’s bathroom, the police found a popcorn tin containing a single-board computer with bitcoins stolen by Zhong. In addition, the authorities seized from him 662 thousand dollars in cash (39.8 million rubles), coins with the bitcoin logo, securities and 11 bars of gold and silver. up to 20 years in prison. Local authorities call the crime he committed the largest theft of cryptocurrency.

In March 2022, Zhong began to voluntarily hand over the bitcoins to which he had access to the state. In total, he turned over more than a thousand bitcoins.

It was previously reported that 37-year-old IT specialist James Howells from the British city of Newport, Wales, decided to use the help of robotic dogs to find a lost disk with bitcoins worth 340 million pounds (24 billion rubles). After studying aerial photographs of a local landfill, he was able to identify a 200 square meter and 15 meter deep area where the missing item could be located.