A man in the UK is taking his estranged wife to court after she allegedly stole 2,323 Bitcoins from his cold wallet. According to British High Court filings, Ping Fai Yuen accuses his wife, Fun Yung Li, of secretly recording him keying in his recovery phrase for his hardware wallet via covert and strategically placed CCTVs inside their own home.
Hardware wallets, for the uninitiated, are basically offline storage devices used by owners to store their cryptocurrency outside of their PC. This is generally considered good practice, as leaving those valuable digital coins on your PC leaves them vulnerable to them being stolen by hackers or other threat actors. Also, 2,323 Bitcoins amount to about US$172 million or around RM677.6 million, with the current average price of one Bitcoin hovering at RM278,500.
Yuen went to court with receipts too: he had installed audio recording devices around his home and captured conversations between his wife and someone else about his missing crypto — could the transfers be traced, how hard would it be to explain the sudden and large influx of cash to banks, potential accusations of money laundering. She even considered using a different wallet and hiring a hacker, as well as a talk about Hong Kong.
The situation was then exacerbated when, in December 2023, Yuen’s wife was arrested by the local authorities, who seized items that included 10 hardware wallets and five recovery seeds.
The case is ongoing, but the presiding judge says that Yuen appears to have a very high probability of success in the case, saying that the provided transcripts were “damning” and that the seized hardware also added to the weight of the evidence.
(Source: Techspot)
