Ireland Seizes 500 Bitcoin Worth €30 Million With Europol Support

A cryptocurrency wallet that Irish authorities had legally seized but could not open for nearly a decade was finally cracked on March 24, 2026, yielding 500 bitcoins worth approximately €30 million, the Criminal Assets Bureau confirmed.

The wallets were uncovered by the Garda after an operation targeting cannabis cultivator Clifton Collins and originally seized in 2019, when they were valued at €53 million. The problem was that no one could get inside them. Collins had hidden the access codes to 12 digital wallets inside the aluminium cap of a fishing rod case in his rented house in Connemara, Co. Galway. When he was jailed for his involvement in drugs, his landlord cleared out the house and the codes were lost.

The Irish High Court ordered the Bitcoin confiscated in 2020, but with the keys gone, CAB could do nothing but wait. At the time of seizure, the full 6,000 BTC was worth roughly €53 million. It has since ballooned to approximately €360 million.

Collins, a 55-year-old former beekeeper, grew cannabis crops in rented houses and sold the harvested drug to criminals, including in his native Crumlin, Dublin. He was jailed for five years. He invested some of the proceeds of his drugs business in Bitcoin, when it was worth only a fraction of its current value, in 2011 and 2012. As the value of his holdings grew, Collins distributed the 6,000 BTC equally across 12 wallets, allocating 500 BTC to each.

What changed in March 2026 was Europol. Neither CAB nor Europol has disclosed the specific technique used. Europol stated only that it provided "highly complex technical expertise and decryption resources" during the operation. According to the official CAB statement, "Europol hosted operational meetings at its headquarters in The Hague, the Netherlands and provided critical support to Bureau investigators and analysts with the provision of highly complex technical expertise and decryption resources vital to the success of the operation."

Ireland's Criminal Assets Bureau worked with Europol to crack the wallet and move the Bitcoin into Coinbase. CAB described the 500 bitcoins as "the proceeds of crime" and placed their value at approximately €30 million.

The breakthrough carries implications well beyond this single wallet. Investigators are optimistic the same decryption technique could unlock all 11 remaining wallets, worth over €330 million. If successful, the Irish state would recover the full 6,000 BTC, a seizure that would dwarf every other asset CAB has ever sold.

While the seizure is not the largest quantity of Bitcoin seized by CAB that constitutes the proceeds of crime, the bureau has been able to gain access to the Bitcoin wallets, unlike a previous case in which thousands of Bitcoin were seized. That means the cryptocurrency can eventually be sold and the proceeds of the sale realised by the State. CAB has previously acknowledged that the value of crypto assets can be difficult to realise, a caveat that, for at least one of Collins's 12 wallets, no longer applies.