Australian Police Crack Coded Crypto Wallet Holding $5.9M

Australian police have cracked a backup of encrypted cryptocurrency wallets containing 9 million Australian dollars ($5.9 million).

Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett. described the effort as “miraculous work” during a speech on Wednesday, crediting a data scientist who has become known within the agency as a “crypto-secure cracker.”

During an investigation into an alleged “well-connected alleged criminal” who amassed cryptocurrency by selling “a technology product to alleged criminals,” the AFP discovered password-protected notes on his cellphone. Upon further examination, law enforcement also identified an image that contained random numbers and words, Barrett said.

Barrett said the numbers were split into six groups with more than 50 combinations, and the AFP’s digital forensics team “determined it could be linked to a crypto wallet”. The suspect refused to hand over the keys to his crypto wallet, an act that carries a 10-year sentence in Australia.

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“We knew if we could not open the crypto wallet, and if the alleged offender was convicted, after the release, he would leave prison a multimillionaire, all from the profits of organized crime,” said Barrett. “For our members, this was not an acceptable outcome.”

How the code was cracked

One of AFP’s data scientists realized that the alleged criminal was “trying to create a booby crypto prize in how the numbers are presented.” To decode the 24 word seed sentencehad 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 looked like they were not computer generated.” He added that these strings “looked like a human had modified the sequence by adding numbers to the front of some sequences.”

This was not 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’s Criminal Asset Forfeiture 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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