Tax Cheat Lesson Leaves SK Police With Egg on Their Face

South Korean tax officials apparently need a crash course in crypto security. In a bid to tout a crackdown on 124 wealthy tax dodgers, the National Tax Service published photos of seized Ledger hardware wallets, along with handwritten seed phrases that function as master passwords to the funds, per Gizmodo. Someone who saw the images sent a bit of ether to one wallet to cover transaction fees, then moved roughly 4 million Pre-Retogeum (PRTG) tokens, worth about $4.8 million, according to the Block.

Per local media, a Hansung University professor called the episode evidence of the agency's "lack of basic understanding" of digital assets, and the loss is being counted in the billions of won. Because the seed phrase went out in a public press release, investigators don't have a clear suspect, and the decentralized nature of most crypto means there's no central body that can simply reverse the transfers. It's at least the second time that South Korean police have seen seized crypto vanish after a recovery phrase leaked, and Ars Technica notes that the suspect(s) either stumbled upon this crypto opportunity by accident or were intentionally keeping tabs on police crypto announcements hoping for another password slipup.