Man Refuses to Give Bitcoin Password to Police - Ep. 7.287

welcome once again to lato's law here's steve lato i'm really not that into the cryptocurrencies i've got all my money tied up in gamestop stock but uh not just kidding keith and b demon both sent me the story and said steve have you caught this uh one of germany story out of germany where the man there is keeping 60 million dollars in bitcoin from the police by simply not revealing his password and of course the people who know about bitcoin will say steve this is one of the great things about bitcoin you know if you get your money in the bank other people can get it you've got your money stuffed in a you know paper bag underneath your mattress other people can get it and of course if you lose your money that's gone but if you've got your money in bitcoin or your your savings in bitcoin uh it's out there and you can make it to where you're the only person who can get it if you play your cards right now there have been problems uh mount gox but here it is the man in germany keeping 60 million dollars in bitcoin from police by simply not revealing his password so ian carlos campbell wrote the story for theverge.com and he says authorities have seized his digital wallet but not his password which of course they need so the cool thing about bitcoin of course is its apparent benefits like the ability to be anonymously owned and securely transferred these are also the things that often create situations like this police in germany have seized more than 60 million dollars in bitcoin from someone but they can't access it because the person they took it from won't tell them his password the man in question was sentenced and has served his time in jail for installing bitcoin mining software on other people's computers and throughout the entire process he never shared a peep about how german authorities should get in they told reuters we asked him but he didn't say that is they asked him about you know what's your password it presents a big and probably obvious question can you really seize something such as money that you can't access or use and that's a problem even more glaring issue is how often passwords pins and their collective absence pop up in stories about bitcoin illegal or otherwise there's a recent story in the new york times about a programmer with his own bitcoin fortune locked in a secure hard drive that revealed an amazing statistic it appears that about 20 percent of bitcoin in existence today completely lost or locked up in wallets with lost passwords meaning that they are completely inaccessible now they're they're guesstimating on some of that but there's some famous stories about guys who come out said yes i got the money it's on this i can't i lost my password it's also the people who who put the password on something they lost that it's a famous story about a guy who had his password i believe on a hard drive and the hard drive got hauled off to the dump and now the dump has got something in it worth a ton of money yeah they're saying it could be about 140 billion dollars of value that's locked up uh or or inaccessible for various reasons so uh this german bitcoin enthusiast is sticking it's the people who had him locked up or it could be he forgot his password you don't know reuters reports that prosecutors have ensured the man that he cannot access access his money but they can't access it either so right now the amount of bitcoin that's locked up out there just got a little bit bigger uh and this guy like i said had 50 million euro value in bitcoin and uh there are a standoff because the man was sentenced served his sentence got out and apparently as part of his sentence was required to surrender uh his his bitcoin that he ill-gotten but but he won't he won't do that so they're stuck and that does remind us of course the story i did not too long ago about the ship of gold the central america there was tommy thompson was the man who spearheaded the efforts to salvage that ship and they got a lot of gold off of it they found the ship in 1988 and when they started recovering gold off that the investors thought great want to get our money back and they got a bunch of gold off and they sold it in various markets but they got even more gold off it after that and some investors said you know we don't think we're getting our fair share here so they filed a lawsuit against tommy thompson and somewhere along the lawsuit he just disappeared and became a fugitive and a fugitive warrant got issued for him and they finally tracked him down and thinking like 2015 maybe i think about 2015 he's hiding out in florida i've seen a couple documentaries on this as well and he got dragged into court and at one point in time in court a judge asked him and said look you know your investors say there's this money out there this this gold off this ship that you have in your possession that they have a right to at least a portion of it and apparently he had said okay i will reveal that if that will help get me out of the situation the court's okay and then he later said oh i forgot where it is and he had a bunch of different stories claimed that he'd put the money in this into suitcases that were in a storage locker someplace someone else testified on his behalf and said yeah but i gave those suitcases to some guy whose name i don't know and and thompson himself i believe even said at one point in time that the money was put into a trust that he has no control over and he also has no knowledge of it's like why would you put it into a trust that you have no control of and you have no knowledge of but the sad part is for mr thompson is that when the court didn't believe him on that the court said well i'm going to find june contempt because he had said i will reveal the whereabouts of this stuff to get out of this trouble so when the court says okay reveal it he said i don't remember i can't do that anymore the judge came to the conclusion that the man was not telling the truth so the judge says i'm going to hold you in contempt of court and find you a thousand dollars a day until you change your mind and that thompson stuck to his gun said i can't change my mind because i i don't i don't know where the stuff is so he's been sitting in jail now for a few years thousand dollars a day is racking up and it's one of those things is this a battle of wills or is the guy really just not capable of revealing the information and this does happen so as you can imagine in germany the man says i don't know the password or i can't give you the password in america tommy thompson's i don't know where this stuff is and so there's several ways of looking at this and and i got a lot of people with the video did about the central america the ship of gold story who said but steve this is so unfair to lock somebody up because they simply won't cooperate with the court well but you're the court let's assume you're the court for a minute you're the judge and you have someone in front of you and they're supposed to tell you something they promise to tell you something i will reveal all they come in front of you and go i changed my mind or i forgot i forgot now if you believe them that they forgot or whatever um you could say okay you know these things happen you can let them go if you're convinced they were lying to you what do you do what do you do and so in the old days a couple hundred years ago they might have ways of making you talk but in a civilized society the judge has only so many options and one of them is to hold the person in contempt and throw them in jail and see what happens and that actually happens i would say a lot but it happens often enough and usually it's when somebody refuses to testify so somebody is a witness to something it's very very important and they show up in court they get on the stand and they just won't testify or they won't take the stand and it's not because they're trying to plead the fifth let's assume that's not the case it's just that they've changed their mind or they don't want to testify or they're scared or whatever they just won't testify and there have been situations before where somebody who won't testify the court will have a hearing with just that person not the jury or anything so you understand that you've been served a subpoena you must testify if you don't testify you will be found in contempt of court and the person can something like that i don't care and i've known cases i've seen cases and read about them where somebody says i'd rather go to jail than testify for whatever reason so somebody gets sent to jail and the question is how long can you hold somebody in jail simply because they're refusing to testify a case well strangely enough as you can imagine trials don't last forever some do but seemingly but trials one of the reasons that they want to really really turn the heat on is because if a case is proceeding and a key witness refuses to testify is sitting in jail sooner or later the case is going to end so the case ends verdict comes down now what do you do so this person still violated a court order but how long do you leave them in jail for that so a lot of places depends on whether you're in the state system or the federal system and also which state you're in a lot of places will have a time frame and say okay you know contempt of court up to a certain length makes sense it might be 90 days might be 120 days something like that but in tommy thompson's case the judge they've actually held hearings afterwards where his attorneys have said you can't hold this guy year after year after year for a simple contempt thing and as of right now all the courts have agreed with the judge on this one saying it looks like the guy knows and is simply not revealing the information because he's hoping he can get out and then re-access that stuff that doesn't belong to him i'm not saying it's right i'm merely pointing out that the law and the courts have so far held it to be right but i've heard of other situations where somebody refuses to testify the trial happens the trial ends and then 90 days into this confinement they bring the person back into court and say just to let you know you're free to go and they let them go uh but they spent 90 days in jail for a contempt of court and there are some other nuances to contempt of court i've never really done too much on this but i can tell you another interesting note is that suppose a person is in court they're a witness a litigant what whatever and the person does something crazy okay something crazy and the interesting thing is they could be held in contempt of court but if the judge was in court and saw it happen the judge might be a witness number one and number two the judge might be actually affected by what that person did it says famous cases such as the manson case helter skelter of vincent bouliose in california where one of the defendants tried attacking the judge in court generally not something attorneys advise you do if you're in a trial but you know what we can call that plan b so if you tried to attack the judge if you had tried to attack the judge and the judge is going to hold you in contempt for that is it fair for that judge to be the one who holds you in contempt and there actually is case law on this depends what state you're in about whether or not that judge can hold the hearing about your contempt or whether another judge has got to come in and hold the hearing because number one the first judge is a witness number two the first judge is obviously gonna be biased because that guy came after me you know so weird weird stuff but uh back the original story right now in germany there's a german man who has presumably the key to unlocking 60 million dollars worth of bitcoin he's served his time he's out now and the police have got his digital wallet but they don't have the password and they're at a standoff it'll be interesting to see what happens so there you go german man keeping 60 million bitcoin from police by not revealing his password ian carlos campbell wrote it keith and b demon sends me thanks a lot questions or comments put them below let's talk to you later bye-bye thank you for watching latos law when one door closes another opens

Channel: Steve Lehto

Views: 537,896

Keywords: lemon law, michigan lemon law, lemon law attorney, lemon law lawyer, http://www.lehtoslaw.com, steve lehto

Id: _HHVgrlCXoQ

Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Mark_Bear]

If you have your seed phrase memorized, and your hardware wallet is protected with a PIN or password, then even if the cops take your hardware wallet:

• They'll never access your Bitcoins
• They can't stop you from accessing them after you're set free - even if they maintain possession of your hardware wallet