Australian police have hacked into an encoded backup of a cryptocurrency wallet containing 9 million Australian dollars ($5.9 million).
Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett called the effort a “miraculous piece of work” during a speech Wednesday, crediting a data scientist who became known within the agency as a “cryptographic security hacker.”
During an investigation into an alleged “well-connected suspected criminal” who was storing cryptocurrency by selling “a technology-like product to suspected criminals”, AFP came across password-protected notes on his mobile phone. Upon further examination, law enforcement also identified an image containing random numbers and words, Barrett said.
Barrett said the figures were divided into six groups with more than 50 combinations, and AFP’s digital investigations team “determined they could be linked to a crypto wallet.” The suspect allegedly refused to hand over the keys to his crypto wallet, an act punishable by a 10-year sentence in Australia.
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“We knew that if we couldn’t open the crypto wallet, and if the alleged offender was convicted, upon release he would leave prison as a multi-millionaire, all thanks to the profits of organized crime,” Barrett said. “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 “tried to create a crazy crypto price in the way the numbers were presented.” To decode the 24-word seed phrase, he had to remove the first digit from each sequence.
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The data scientist explained that “some strings of numbers appeared wrong and appeared not to have been computer generated.” He added that these strings “made it look like a human had altered the sequence by adding numbers at the beginning of some sequences.”
This was not the first crypto recovery for the AFP digital investigations team. In another case, the same unidentified data scientist helped recover more than $3 million in digital assets using a different decoding technique.
In both cases, the crypto was seized by the AFP-led Criminal Asset Forfeiture Task Force. If the court orders the funds to be forfeited, the money will end up in a Commonwealth account and be redistributed by Home Secretary Tony Burke to fund crime prevention.
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