On 9 June 2021, 24.465 BTC was stolen from my Trezor after I entered my recovery seed into what I believed was a legitimate Trezor page. It wasn’t. I had been redirected to a fake page through a malicious Chrome extension.
The stolen bitcoin was traced on-chain. Months later, it began arriving at deposit addresses belonging to Huobi, now HTX.
Blockchain investigators alerted the exchange within hours.
The transactions continued.
I spent the following years trying to understand what had happened and attempting to recover the bitcoin. Eventually I took the matter to the UK High Court.
In December 2024, the court entered judgment in my favour and ordered the return/payment of assets valued at approximately £1.95 million.
HTX did not comply with the judgment.
What fascinates and frustrates me about the case is that Bitcoin itself did exactly what it was supposed to do. The blockchain preserved the trail. Years later, those transactions are still there for anyone with the appropriate expertise to analyse.
The difficult part was what happened when that trail reached a centralised exchange.
Five years after the theft, I am still pursuing the case and still trying to understand exactly who was behind it and where the bitcoin ultimately went.
I’m curious what people here think about one particular question:
When an exchange is warned in real time that identifiable stolen bitcoin is arriving at its deposit addresses, what should we reasonably expect that exchange to do?
submitted by /u/Capital_Situation961
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