There was an auction for at least 10 BTC, with bids surpassing $ 60 million. The auctions ended on Wednesday.
According to official reports and publications, a considerable amount of bitcoin, seized in criminal proceedings for illicit activities, got auctioned in Germany this week.
The Ministry of Justice of North Rhine-Westphalia, in that European nation, revealed the activity both at a press conference and on the official website.
The assets got sold in small amounts of up to 0.1 BTC and, the final instance was to deliver these assets to the highest bidder under the modality of a paper wallet. The private keys and addresses that were necessary to manage got physically located.
As shown by the publication of the bitcoin auction, the offered amount was around USD 65,187.58, that is, about USD 2,845 more than the current price of the cryptocurrency.
There were auctions of 0.5 bitcoins, with offers that surpassed USD 30,895.87. There was even one, for 10 BTC, valued at USD 60,426,479.29. According to a Reddit forum, at least 215 bitcoins got auctioned by that German judicial entity.
Bitcoin Auction Details
The German state body brought all the details of the auctions. One of them highlighted that each portion of BTC would get secured in an official paper wallet of the Office of cybercrime control or ZAC NRW.
The entity clarified that the auctions ended Wednesday at noon, as they had just over 13 hours active when the information went public. Winners have to collect their BTC at the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s Office in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia.
The Office indicated that when the highest bidder in one of the auctions got chosen, and the transfer of the assets would have happened personally with the paper wallet that includes the private key necessary to manage the BTC.
In any case, the entity clarified that the delivery or transfer happened after receiving the payment at the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s Office, which had to get done before and by bank transfer.
Not the First Auction of Seized BTC
The activity led by the German Ministry of Justice is not new. In the past, auctions have already happened to get rid of bitcoins from illicit activities.
The most recent case happened in France, where the Agency for the Management and Recovery of Seized and Confiscated Assets brought at least 611 BTC valued at USD 34 million. The event counted on the massive assistance of 1,500 interested parties.
The AGRASC did not unveil the origin of the seized Bitcoins. But according to unidentified sources, these bitcoins might come from the Gatehub case, the platform that got hacked in 2019.
And last year, a series of reports highlighted that in the United States of America, the authorities auctioned at least 185,230 bitcoins from illicit activities, raising, at the time, USD 151,440,000.
By: Jenson Nuñez
