A British man who lost access to his Bitcoin (BTC) 12 years ago finally has control of his holdings which has turned him into an overnight millionaire, LBC reported on Aug. 26. The man, who w
A British man who lost access to his Bitcoin (BTC) 12 years ago finally has control of his holdings which has turned him into an overnight millionaire, LBC reported on Aug. 26.
The man, who wants to remain anonymous, bought Bitcoin worth £1,500 (around $2,400) in 2011, after a friend convinced him that the cryptocurrency was going to be a “massive thing.”
It had been only two years since Bitcoin's launch and not many people had realized its potential.
But this man was an early Bitcoin buyer who purchased it over Intersango, one of the earliest crypto trading exchanges in the United Kingdom.
But the exchange, launched in 2011, went down in 2014, and its users were left without any clarity about their holdings.
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When the anonymous man tried logging in to his Intersango account, he discovered that it was frozen. Much to his disappointment, Intersango was not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA).
His octogenarian parents with health concerns and children's university education put him under a financial burden. Meanwhile, Bitcoin kept rallying all these years and he couldn't do anything about his holdings.
“It was a punch in the stomach watching Bitcoin go up and up. After a while, I stopped watching it because I thought: 'there’s no point, it's lost… I had written them off.'” He said: “The worst thing was… knowing what I could have done with the money."
But he received emails from two of Intersango’s co-founders in 2018, asking the former users to reach out. But he deleted those mails, fearing they were scams.
But this year, his wife asked him to get in touch with a law firm specializing in recovering lost cryptocurrency.
Within months, the lawyers successfully regained access to the man’s lost Bitcoin, now worth £3.3 million ($4.4 million), and helped the man access it.
Ryan Sweetnam, Director of Financial Litigation at CEL Solicitors, said he gathered all the documentation proving his client's ownership of the cryptocurrency.
One of the Intersango co-founders holds 5,500 Bitcoin, at least some of which belong to former customers in the U.K., Sweetnam alleged.
The man now holds his Bitcoin on an FCA-regulated crypto exchange but he keeps checking his account "20 times a day” to confirm his holdings.
“I'm still worried about scammers and hackers. You never know what might happen because although the wallet’s there and the exchange that I'm with is regulated, nothing really is regulated for crypto."
The man revealed that he is going to sell some of his Bitcoin holdings to buy a bigger house to accommodate his ill mother-in-law. He is also going to throw a party and go for a family vacation, he added.
BTC/USD, Source: DecibelBitcoin was trading at $78,489 at the time of writing, as per Decibel.
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