International Investigation into the Theft of Cryptocurrencies with Europol Cooperation

Our client fell victim to the theft of a large quantity of bitcoins from his corporate digital wallet — valued at the time of the events at approximately 1,300,000 euros — stolen by an unknown perpetrator who immediately moved the funds through a chain of cryptocurrency addresses to hinder tracing. This type of offence poses an additional challenge compared with traditional property crime: the decentralised, cross-border nature of cryptocurrencies calls for a highly specialised technical investigation coordinated at international level.

Our action consisted of filing the criminal complaint and, together with the National Police's Cybercrime Unit, activating the international cooperation mechanisms needed to trace the stolen funds. Europol was informed of the “notitia criminis”, enabling Europol's EC3 Unit to produce a specialised intelligence report that succeeded in de-anonymising a substantial part of the transactions and tracing the funds' path through a bitcoin-mixing service, despite the use of this technique specifically designed to hinder the tracking of the money.

The cross-matching of international information with the Greek authorities produced a positive result, making it possible to identify the main suspect wallet and its holder, as well as to locate additional wallets linked to a cryptocurrency exchange through which part of the stolen money had passed — a total traced amount of approximately 1,648 BTC, equivalent to around 55,000,000 euros across all the movements analysed. On this basis, a formal request was made to the judicial authority for the precautionary freezing of the identified balances, leaving the proceedings in a position to continue the recovery efforts and the definitive identification of those responsible, backed by this entire international technical investigation.