Chinese court treats Bitcoin as property in 107 BTC memory theft case
Man in eastern China who stole 107 Bitcoin using a memorized seed phrase gets 10 years and nine months behind bars.
A court in the eastern Chinese city of Qingdao sentenced a man to 10 years and nine months in prison for stealing 107 Bitcoin after memorizing most of a victim’s 12-word wallet seed phrase.
The Licang District People’s Court sentenced the perpetrator, identified as Zhang, to prison and fined him 100,000 yuan (about $14,700) after finding he took control of the victim’s wallet and later cashed out more than $97,000, according to the case summary published by the Supreme People’s Procuratorate’s official WeChat account.
Feng asked Zhang, an acquaintance who had previously helped with Bitcoin transactions, to assist in cashing out 117 Bitcoin in July 2023. While Feng wrote down the wallet’s 12-word recovery phrase during setup, Zhang memorized 11 of them and later reconstructed the final word to transfer 107 Bitcoin.
