When a Swedish man was convicted of earning 36 Bitcoin through drug dealing online, which amounted to 1.3 million Krona (roughly 150,000 USD), the price of Bitcoin was around $4200. The Swedish government seized the coins from him on the grounds that $150,000 was illegally received from drug customers. However, they didn’t sell the coins, instead holding onto them as evidence.
Now that the price of Bitcoin has skyrocketed to over ten times that of where it was when the drug dealer was arrested over two years ago in 2019, his lawyer successfully argued in court that, due to the coins appreciating in value and the amount of Krona according to records was seized, and since prosecutor Tove Kullberg filed the seizure under fiat currency, there is a difference of 33 Bitcoin owed back to him. Those 33 coins are now worth over 1.5 million U.S. Dollars, which the defendant views of a massive win.
Kullberg told the press that she felt this was unjust, saying that what was seized was a bitcoin wallet, not fiat dollars, and that there is a lesson to be learned here when prosecuting cases involving cryptocurrency. According to Kullberg, authorities should be more educated on crypto in order to properly handle these types of cases in the future.