50,000 stolen Bitcoin worth over $3 billion found hidden in circuit board at bottom of popcorn tin

Picture used for illustrative purposes.

People have found strange ways of hiding contraband, particularly drugs, in food items. They have been found packaged as cream filling in cookies, in bananas that have been hollowed out, and even in chocolate wrappers.

Now, even Bitcoin has made its way into the field of covert concealment: a man from Georgia, James Zhong, stashed away around 50,676 Bitcoin worth $3.36 billion in a circuit board hidden at the bottom of a popcorn tin in a bathroom closet.

Zhong deceitfully procured the cryptocurrency from The Silk Road, a site on the dark web once known as the Amazon of drugs, ten years ago.

Zong has confessed to his crime.

For almost 10 years, the whereabouts of this massive chunk of missing Bitcoin remained a big mystery.

Thanks to impressive strides in technology – state-of-the-art cryptocurrency tracing – and good old-fashioned police work, the guardians of the law tracked down the illegal stash.

From 2011 to 2013, Silk Road was used by numerous drug dealers to funnel huge amounts of narcotics and other illicit goods and services to buyers.

In 2015 Silk Road’s founder Ross Ulbricht was convicted by a unanimous jury and sentenced to life in prison, according to Indo-Asian News Service.

Zhong funded the fraud accounts with an initial deposit of between 200 and 2,000 bitcoin. After the initial deposit, he then quickly executed a series of withdrawals.

He now faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison.