A MT. GOX CLAIM PAID 7.3 BITCOIN INTO A KRAKEN ACCOUNT IN MARCH 2025 — FEDERAL AGENTS SEIZED IT UNDER A WARRANT TRACING IT TO 2013 SILK ROAD SALES — ON OCTOBER 16, 2026 PROSECUTORS FILED TO KEEP IT
On October 16, federal prosecutors in Manhattan filed to keep 7.31968106 bitcoin and 7.31967705 bitcoin cash. The coins didn't come from a raid or a dealer's wallet. They came from a Mt. Gox payout. The complaint says the Mt. Gox trustee sent the funds to Kraken on or about March 25, 2025, and Kraken credited a customer's account. A magistrate judge signed a seizure warrant on or about the same date, and Kraken moved the coins to a wallet run by Homeland Security Investigations, which still holds them.
Here's the trail the government lays out. A person it calls Individual-1 opened a Mt. Gox account on January 17, 2013, with a legal name and date of birth. About 456.75 of the 467.943 bitcoin that went into it, 97.6%, came straight from a Silk Road vendor account called SuperHighFly, including 75 bitcoin on September 15, 2013 and 94 on September 19. Mt. Gox froze accounts in February 2014. More than 11 years later, Individual-1 named a Kraken account, opened with the same name and birth date, to get paid. The complaint doesn't say Individual-1 is SuperHighFly, and it charges no one.
This is what custody looks like over a decade. Coins left on an exchange stop being coins you can move. They become a claim with your name on it. This claim sat in a Japanese bankruptcy for 11 years, then landed at a US exchange that knew exactly who it belonged to, and the warrant was there the day it arrived. The bitcoin cash came along too. It exists because every bitcoin balance on August 1, 2017 got a matching coin, and the complaint says that copy carries the same taint. The filing says both amounts are net of fees charged along the way. They differ by 401 sats.
The seizure and the forfeiture filing are 570 days apart. The government now asks the court to call anyone with an interest in the coins to appear and show cause why they shouldn't be forfeited. The case is 1:26-cv-09136 in the Southern District of New York, and we found no coverage of it as of October 22. At the time of this writing, bitcoin was $81,245.