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Landau / Koblenz (dpa) - The drug money in the Internet currency Bitcoin in the millions confiscated from a dealer convicted in Landau has almost completely disappeared.
The Koblenz attorney general Jürgen Brauer announced on Tuesday that the online depot had been cleared at the end of 2019.
In view of ongoing investigations into money laundering, he does not provide any information as to whether the convicted dealer or someone else could have been responsible for the almost complete account management.
The investigators are said to have no access to the confiscated Bitcoin depot due to lack of knowledge of the necessary password.
First the newspaper "Rheinpfalz" reported about it.
The Landau district court sentenced the dealer to almost 15 years in prison in 2017 because, according to the judges, he had built one of the largest online shops for illegal drugs in Germany called "Chemical Love". For more than 5,300 drug deals, he was supposed to pay the state only ten and after a later judgment in an appeal process still 1.5 million euros.
Meanwhile, the Bitcoin price has risen sharply.
The "Rheinpfalz" spoke of an "Internet treasure" that had disappeared and was now theoretically worth a good 20 million euros.
The question of what value in euros on what date the convicted offender owes the state is legally complicated.
Attorney General Brauer stated: "The legal issues in connection with the skimming of Bitcoins are still largely unresolved in the case law."
The Rhineland-Palatinate CDU parliamentary group vice-president Matthias Lammert called on Tuesday to significantly increase the number of criminal investigators and IT experts in the fight against cyber crime in the country.
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© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210427-99-376404 / 2