United Kingdom: dealer paid in bitcoin gets four years in prison, Rolex and BTC seized

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However, the loot almost makes you smile. His 4,104 pounds of bitcoin are worth just under 5,000 euros today and cost him four years behind bars.

The song is about parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. But Benjamin Dack's menu was shorter. Cannabis, in large volumes, sold from the North Yorkshire seaside resort and surrounding areas. Then the local police opened their investigation in 2023 and arrested him for the first time.

You know the rest. Dack therefore resumes his business as if the police custody had been a simple setback.

But his phone chatters for him. According to BBC News, the device shows that the man was buying and reselling his merchandise in cryptocurrencies. In short, turnkey accounting for investigators.

In court, the defendant then changed three pleas to “guilty”. Possession of cannabis for sale, possession of criminal property and involvement in the supply of the drug. An assault on a member of the emergency services, dated April 22, 2026, remains on file without being judged. Investigator Alfie Thomlinson sums up the case in one sentence, Dack was “heavily involved in the supply of cannabis on a large scale”.

And then there are watches. Rolexes, seized with the rest, I named the official accessory of the crypto delinquent for a good decade, as with this darknet fentanyl dealer who was facing twenty years.

The misunderstanding is always the same. A bitcoin is not hidden in a sock. It is registered on a blockchain, a public register that anyone can consult. A financial investigator from North Yorkshire with a coffee and a block explorer too. An address remains a pseudonym. However, investigators know how to link it to an identity as soon as a seized exchange or telephone enters the loop.

Amy Monkman, financial investigator on the case, says it bluntly. “Cryptocurrency is becoming a popular method for hiding assets,” and its service intends to continue tracking them. In total, the seizure concerns around 4,104 pounds in bitcoin and 7,580 pounds in cash, or nearly 14,000 euros at the current price.

The courts have scheduled a hearing for March 2027 under the Proceeds of Crime Act, the British law which allows the profits from crime to be confiscated. The Rolexes will go there, as well as anything that the investigators will have found by then on the chain.

Chainalysis repeats it in each of its reports: criminals always think their transactions are untraceable. Yet blockchain analysts are selling precisely the opposite to polices around the world.

Machine-translated from French