British investor recovers Bitcoin worth 6 billion won after exchange closure

For more than a decade, Chris believed his Bitcoin had disappeared with a cryptocurrency exchange. Then a British law firm helped recover assets now worth about 6 billion won.

Chris, a British investor whose real name has not been disclosed, bought Bitcoin worth £1,500 from the local exchange Britcoin in December 2011. The investment was worth about 2.7 million won at the time. Britcoin later changed its name to Intersango, stopped trading in late 2012 and closed its service in early 2014.

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The hardest part was watching the price of Bitcoin rise and thinking about what I could have done with that money.

Chris spent more than 10 years unable to access the assets and came to regard the Bitcoin as lost. He said watching the price rise was especially painful because he kept thinking about what the money could have done for his family. At the time, he had young children, had recently moved into a new home and was not in a strong financial position.

The recovery began after the British law firm CEL Solicitors used cryptocurrency-tracing software to identify a wallet believed to contain assets belonging to Intersango users. The report says that discovery led to the recovery of Chris’s holdings.

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I had young children and a new house at the time, and I was not in a good financial position, so it was a shock.