UK police forfeit $1.4M in Bitcoin tied to defunct darknet markets

A regional English police force has forfeited 20.21 Bitcoin and other assets worth $1.4 million, tracing the funds back to darknet markets that shut down years ago, Decrypt reported. Avon and Somerset Police said Thursday its financial investigation unit recovered the Bitcoin alongside further cryptoassets and bank funds, totaling £1,032,487.86 combined.

The person under investigation had a previous money laundering conviction and has since died. Officers, working with the force's cyber team, traced the holdings to darknet markets that operated between 2016 and 2019, all now shut down. The force said the sites had facilitated crimes ranging from drug supply to people trafficking, without naming them.

That window covers the most heavily policed stretch in darknet market history. AlphaBay, then the largest market of its kind anywhere, was seized in July 2017. Dutch police had already taken over the darknet market Hansa and ran it covertly for a month, harvesting the details of users fleeing AlphaBay, before shutting it down the same day AlphaBay fell. Dream Market absorbed much of what traffic remained, then announced its own closure in March 2019 and went fully dark by the end of April.

Davis pointed to the permanent record those old transactions left on the blockchain, calling it an invaluable source of evidence. Every payment those markets processed nearly a decade ago is still there to trace, whether the people who made them expected that or not.

• Total forfeited: 20.21 BTC plus other crypto and bank funds, $1.4M / £1,032,487.86 combined
• Suspect: had a prior money laundering conviction, has since died
• Source of funds: darknet markets active 2016-2019, all now shut down
• Legal basis: UK crypto wallet freezing orders, in effect since April 2024
• Record: the force's largest crypto seizure under those powers to date

The case is the largest crypto seizure the force has logged since UK wallet freezing orders took effect in April 2024. Those powers let officers freeze and seize crypto without an arrest first, move funds into wallets controlled by law enforcement, and confiscate written passwords or storage devices. Police can destroy an asset outright if required, and the government singled out privacy coins specifically as "not conducive to the public good" when the rules came in. The tools have grown more relevant as AI-assisted crypto crime climbs across the board, giving investigators more to trace and more reason to use every power available.

UK forces aren't alone in cashing in on old blockchain trails. In the US, the government moved $288 million in previously seized crypto into a Coinbase Prime account earlier this year, part of a broader pattern of law enforcement treating years-old wallets as recoverable assets rather than dead ends.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.