One of many oldest wallets on the Bitcoin community moved over $400 million BTC after a curious authorized problem by an entity claiming to be Salomon Brothers.
Funded with 4,000 BTC on June 27, 2011 when 1 coin was value simply $17, the pockets had ballooned from lower than $70,000 to over $400 million by the point it acquired this on-chain message.
Particularly, somebody gave the pockets 0.0003 BTC (about $30) as a way to publish three OP_RETURN output messages on June 30, July 2, and July 8. Sure sorts of OP_RETURN outputs show as plain textual content on block explorers like Mempool.house.
These three messages claimed to be a authorized discover, instructing the recipient to go to a webpage.
‘Constructive possession’ of billions of {dollars}
On that webpage, the authenticity of which Protos can’t confirm, textual content claims {that a} shopper of the once-great Wall Avenue establishment is taking “constructive possession” of the pockets.
It claims the pockets is deserted, offers a 90-day discover interval, and makes numerous different calls for.
That deadline of October 10, if it truly is an genuine deadline, elapsed earlier than the pockets moved 4,000 BTC on October 23.
Constructive possession is a authorized time period and refers to “the right to obtain physical control and/or a variety of rights over someone else’s physical control of that property.”
After all, it’s unclear whether or not the discover constitutes authorized service of data in any respect.
The entity publishing OP_RETURN messages dusted over 39,000 dormant wallets with BTC repossession notices, together with one pockets that possessed over $8 billion.
To this point, no US courtroom has ever dominated on the flexibility to repossess previous BTC for merely broadcasting messages into previous wallets.
Don’t go to suspicious Salomon Brothers web sites
Regardless of repeated makes an attempt to contact executives of Salomon Brothers, Protos has been unable to confirm whether or not these actions are literally the work of Salomon Brothers or another person making an attempt to make use of its model.
Salomon Brothers as soon as rebranded to Salomon Encore, modified executives, and migrated web sites a number of occasions through the years.
As well as, the web site as soon as contained an elementary grammatical error and different purple flags of phishing campaigns.
BitMEX Analysis, a Bitcoin historian, was additionally unconvinced that the genuine Salomon Brothers firm managed the web site.
As with all suspicious internet hyperlink, Protos doesn’t suggest viewing or visiting any unsolicited webpage. Consumer data obtained from the web site might be used for phishing, social engineering, or bodily threats.
In any case, the motion of enormous portions of 14-year-old BTC, particularly BTC focused by an suspicious repossession try on-chain, logged a curiosity for Bitcoin historians.
As fashionable courts and customers of the Bitcoin community try to grasp who controls a few of the largest BTC wallets, the Salomon Brothers-branded OP_RETURN incidents of 2025 are definitely an attention-grabbing case research.
