Australian authorities successfully decrypted a cryptocurrency wallet backup with a value of 9 million Australian dollars ($5.9 million).
Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett highlighted the achievement as “miraculous work” in a Wednesday speech, acknowledging a data scientist who has gained recognition as a “crypto safe cracker.”
While investigating a purported “well-connected alleged criminal” who amassed cryptocurrency from selling “a tech-type product to alleged criminals,” the AFP discovered password-protected notes on the suspect’s mobile device. Further investigation revealed an image containing random numbers and words, Barrett noted.
Barrett stated that the numbers were organized into six groups with over 50 combinations, and the AFP’s digital forensics team concluded they could be linked to a crypto wallet. The suspect allegedly declined to share the keys to his crypto wallet, which could incur a 10-year penalty in Australia.
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“We understood that if we couldn’t unlock the crypto wallet, should the alleged offender be convicted, he would leave prison a multi-millionaire, benefiting from organized crime,” Barrett expressed. “This was not an acceptable outcome for our members.”
How the code was deciphered
One of AFP’s data scientists noticed that the alleged criminal “attempted to create a crypto booby trap in the way the numbers were formatted.” To decode the 24-word seed phrase, he had to eliminate the first number from each sequence.
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The data scientist indicated that “some of the number strings seemed erroneous and did not appear to be computer-generated.” He added that those strings “looked as if a human had altered the sequence by adding numbers at the front of some sequences.”
This was not the first instance of crypto recovery for AFP’s digital forensics unit. In another case, the same unnamed data scientist aided in recovering over $3 million in digital assets utilizing a different decoding method.
In both situations, the crypto was confiscated by the AFP-led Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce. If the court mandates the funds’ forfeiture, the money will be allocated to a commonwealth account and redistributed by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke for crime prevention initiatives.
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