Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett revealed that the agency successfully accessed a cryptocurrency wallet valued at $6 million ($9M AUD), belonging to an alleged organized crime member. During a National Press Club address, Barrett detailed that the agency was close to losing the funds, stating that if they couldn’t open the wallet, the accused “would leave prison a multimillionaire,” an outcome the AFP deemed “unacceptable.”
The breakthrough was achieved thanks to human intuition rather than computational power. A data scientist from the Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce (CACT) detected a pattern that computer overlooked. The analyst experienced a “scientific epiphany” upon noticing that the codes didn’t appear machine-generated but rather “human-modified.” The alleged criminal had attempted to create a “booby prize” by adding numbers to the front of sequences; by removing these, the analyst deciphered the 24-word recovery phrase.
Should a court order the forfeiture of the cryptocurrencies, the funds will be directed to a Commonwealth account to be redistributed by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke for crime prevention measures. Commissioner Barrett emphasized that this success proves the continued essentiality of human creativity and added that the same analyst has since cracked another wallet using a different method, recovering an additional $1.9 million.
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