BRAZIL’S SANTA CATARINA POLICE FIND 4 SEED PHRASES IN OPERATION CLICKFIX RAIDS — $1.7 MILLION IN BTC, ETH, TRX AND USDT MOVED IN 13 TRANSFERS TO A POLICE ACCOUNT AT FOXBIT — NOBODY SAYS HOW MUCH WAS BITCOIN

On September 10, 2026, the Civil Police of Santa Catarina, Brazil, served 17 search warrants and 2 arrest warrants in Operation ClickFix. The group is accused of using fake browser error messages to trick victims into running malicious code. The police announced it on October 7 and called the crypto part the largest seizure from self-custody wallets by any Brazilian civil police force: about US$1,708,534, or R$8,781,864.

The police release does not say which coins were taken. The detective who took them does. In a LinkedIn post, Eduardo Graebin says his team found 4 seed phrases while serving the warrants, loaded the wallets on the spot, found funds on several addresses and chains, and moved them in 13 transfers to the police force’s own account at the Brazilian exchange Foxbit. He lists BTC, ETH, TRX and USDT. He gives no split, so nobody outside the case has said how much of it was bitcoin.

This is self-custody cutting both ways. Nobody broke a key and nobody asked a company to freeze anything. The police found the words, and the words were the money. Whoever holds the seed phrase holds the coins, suspect or detective. And the coins did not go to a wallet the state controls itself. They now sit in an account in the police’s name at a private exchange.

Graebin also says a Chainalysis tool, Wallet Scan, found about US$218,000 more, roughly R$1.12 million, that could have been missed by relying only on what ordinary wallet software showed. His post does not say whether that sum is inside the $1.71 million. One seed phrase can open more addresses than any one app displays. If you keep one, know every place it reaches, because the next person to type it in can find them all. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $82,550.