Australian police have successfully decrypted a coded cryptocurrency wallet backup containing 9 million Australian dollars ($5.9 million) in digital assets.
Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Krissy Barrett hailed the breakthrough as “miraculous work” during a Wednesday address, praising a data scientist within the agency who’s earned the nickname “the crypto safe cracker.”
The discovery came during an investigation into an alleged high-profile criminal who reportedly amassed crypto holdings by selling a “tech-type product to other alleged criminals.” While searching the suspect’s phone, investigators uncovered password-protected notes and an image filled with random numbers and words, Barrett said.
According to Barrett, the numbers were arranged into six groups with over 50 possible combinations. The AFP’s digital forensics team deduced that the pattern was likely linked to a crypto wallet. The suspect, however, allegedly refused to provide the wallet’s access keys — an offense that can carry up to a 10-year prison sentence under Australian law.
“We knew that if we couldn’t unlock the crypto wallet and the alleged offender was convicted, he could walk out of prison a multi-millionaire — all from the proceeds of organized crime,” Barrett said. “For our members, that was not an acceptable outcome.”
How the code was cracked
An AFP data scientist eventually discovered that the suspect had attempted to disguise the crypto wallet’s recovery phrase by inserting extra numbers into the sequence — what he described as a “crypto booby prize.”
To decode the 24-word seed phrase, the investigator removed the first number from each of the six sequences, revealing the correct combination. “Some of the number strings just felt off — they didn’t look computer-generated,” the data scientist explained. “It looked like a human had manually altered them by adding numbers to the front.”
It wasn’t the first time the AFP’s digital forensics unit had pulled off such a recovery. In an earlier case, the same analyst helped retrieve more than $3 million in crypto using a different decoding method.
Both seizures were carried out by the AFP-led Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce. If the court orders the funds to be forfeited, the recovered assets will be deposited into a commonwealth account and redistributed by Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke to support crime prevention initiatives.
