Swedish authorities have reportedly returned nearly $ 1.3 million worth of bitcoins caught up in a drug dealer who saved money in illegal online sales.
After the arrest of the drug dealer, Swedish law enforcement began auctioning off 36 bitcoins accumulated at the time.
However, the value of the stolen cryptocurrency has since been estimated to the point that only 3 bitcoins were auctioned to cover the Fiat value of the bitcoin stolen during the illegal sale.
As a result, the remaining 33 bitcoins, worth more than $ 1 million today, were returned to the drug dealer.
“This in many ways, it’s sad. This led to consequences that I could not have foreseen at the time,” prosecutor Tove Kullberg told Swedish Radio. He added that a lesson needs to be learned about future cryptocurrency-related crimes.
“The lesson to be learned from this is that maintaining the value of bitcoin, no matter how valuable bitcoin was at the time, the profits from the crime must be 36 bitcoins,” Kullberg said.
Moreover, the prosecution believes that this is only the beginning of a future series of crimes related to cryptography.
“I think we probably need to invest in internal training, because cryptocurrency is going to be a factor that we’re going to deal with a lot more than we’re doing right now,”he said.
It turns out Cullberg may have some allies in his quest to focus on cryptocurrency.
Sweden and crypto
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies could soon be audited by regulators in Sweden.
In June this year, Sweden’s Central Bank Governor Stefan Ingves suggested that the cryptocurrency was unlikely to avoid regulation permanently.
“Bitcoin likely to avoid regulation”: Rixbank Executive
“When something is big enough, things like consumer interests and money laundering come into play. So there’s good reason to believe that regulation will happen, ” Ingves said.
There is a list of the
