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A member of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) he succeeded access to a digital wallet containing approximately $6 million in cryptocurrency.
The wallet belongs to a person suspected of being involved in organized criminal activity.
Commissioner of the AFP Krissy Barrett was talking about the case during a recent National Press Club event. She explained that the the police risked losing access to the wallet.
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If they had not found a way before the suspect went to prison, he could have been released later with millions still under his control.
The discovery did not come from computers or encryption software, but from a data scientist working with the AFP’s Criminal Asset Forfeiture Taskforce.
The analyst had been given an image showing numbers and words grouped into blocks of six characters. There were over 50 different groupings. While these appeared to be randomly generated, the official suspected they had been manually altered.
Barrett said the data expert noted that the sequence does not feel like machine-generated code. Instead, it looked like someone had changed it, possibly to hide the real access details.
Acting on an intuition, the analyst removed the first number in each group. What remained was a valid recovery sentence of 24 words.
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 develop? Read the full story.
