Finnish Customs, known as Tulli, has collected 1,666 confiscated Bitcoins since 2016. However, Tulli did not sell the Bitcoin because it was feared it would be used for acts of irresponsible parties.
In fact, the Customs and Excise Agency had drawn up a plan in September 2018 to conduct auctions, but officials were worried that the process could cause a lot of crime and become a boom for Customs
“From our perspective, the problem is specifically related to the risk of money laundering. Buyers of [cryptocurrency] rarely use it for normal business, “said Director Tulli Pekka Pylkkanen, quoted from Coindesk.
Tulli confiscated a lot of Bitcoin as evidence of the action of the dark net, at that time Bitcoin was trading around $ 570, meaning 1,666 BTC was worth around $ 950,000. If based on the current price of Bitcoin which is valued at $ 8,784 then the seized Bitcoin owned by Finland has a price of $ 14.6 million, equivalent to Rp208 billion.
In 2018, the Finnish government also banned customs officials from trying to sell confiscated bitcoins on exchanges or trading platforms, instead instructing agents to hold digital assets seized in safe cold storage solutions.
Pylkkanen’s claim that most crypto holders use it for illicit purposes is not supported by numbers. A November report from the blockchain analytics company Elliptic suggested $ 829 million in bitcoin, only 0.5 percent of all transactions, related to the dark web.
Other Countries that Confiscated Bitcoin
Tulli is not the only government authority that has to decide what to do with confiscated bitcoin, usually with a dollar value several times greater than when they were first confiscated.
The U.S. government, which has confiscated millions of dollars worth of bitcoin over the years, has held several online auctions for seized bitcoin.
Bitcoin seized by Belgian authorities was sold by an online auction house in early 2019. Later that year, US police used the same auctioneer to sell cryptocurrency worth more than $ 290,000 that was confiscated from teen hackers.
