ARBISTAR MIXED ITS BITCOIN — GUARDIA CIVIL SAYS 881 BTC LEFT ON THE DAY OF THE CRASH — THE 20,000 BTC FIGURE COUNTS COINS GOING IN AND OUT

Arbistar, a crypto firm in the south of Tenerife, collapsed in September 2020. Spanish courts found it took more than 200 million euros from some 32,000 people. On October 23, 2026, the Spanish news agency EFE reported on a Guardia Civil report filed in the money laundering case that followed. As carried in English by Teneriffa News, it says that “on the date of the crash, 881 bitcoins were transferred to other wallets.” Around the time Arbistar told investors it had trouble paying, it used “mixing,” a service “employed to anonymise funds and make it difficult to trace their origin.”

The mixing did not end the trail. EFE’s next line: “Despite this, it was found that some of the beneficiaries were relatives of the administrators.” Four remain under investigation and eight more have not been identified. The Audiencia Nacional, Spain’s national court, opened the separate laundering case in April. In March it refused to widen the list of defendants. It has now reversed that, saying the refusal must not become a “guarantee of impunity.”

Now the big number. EFE says that from January to March 2021, “inflows and outflows of more than 20,000 bitcoins, equivalent at the time to 710 million euros, were traced to the defendants’ wallets.” Bitcoin.com News headlined that as wallets that “moved over $1.1B in bitcoin,” priced at March 31, 2021. But inflows and outflows count a coin twice if it comes in and goes back out. The 20,000 measures traffic through the wallets. It is not a count of coins taken, and it is not what investors lost.

This is what a public ledger does. A mixer makes the record harder to read. It does not erase it, and police read it anyway. What the report, as described, does not give is addresses, where the 881 coins ended up, or any coins seized or frozen. Until it does, the trail is a claim you cannot check. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $79,784.