A British man accuses his wife of using surveillance cameras to steal $172 million in Bitcoin

BlockBeats News, March 17th, according to CoinDesk's report, the UK High Court ruled last week that a theft case involving 2,323 bitcoins (currently worth about $172 million) can proceed to trial, testing how UK property law applies to digital assets.

UK resident Ping Fai Yuen alleges in court documents that his estranged wife, Fun Yung Li, secretly obtained the mnemonic seed phrase to his hardware wallet through home surveillance cameras in August 2023 and transferred the aforementioned bitcoins without authorization. At the time of the theft, the bitcoins were worth about $60 million, and they have since risen to around $172 million at current prices. These bitcoins were held in a PIN-protected Trezor cold wallet, but anyone with the 24-word seed phrase can reconstruct the wallet and move the funds. The transferred bitcoins have undergone multiple transactions and are currently dispersed across 71 non-exchange blockchain addresses, remaining unmoved since December 21, 2023.

Yuen stated that after his daughter warned him of his wife's attempt to steal the bitcoins, he promptly installed recording devices in his home. Upon discovering the transfer, he confronted his wife, assaulted her, pleaded guilty to charges of assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and two counts of common assault in 2024. When the police searched his wife's residence, they found multiple hardware wallets and seed phrases but took no further action pending new evidence.

Legally, the wife's side sought to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the primary allegation by the husband falls under "conversion tort," a charge traditionally applicable under English law to tangible property, not digital assets like bitcoins. The court acknowledged this view but ruled that the case could proceed based on other alternative legal claims, and if the allegations are substantiated, the related bitcoins could still be recovered.