Bonkers Bitcoin heist: 5-star hotels, cash-filled envelopes, vanishing funds

Kent Halliburton, the CEO of Sazmining, travelled to Amsterdam in August 2025 to meet two representatives of a Monaco-based family office and discuss a multi-million-dollar deal for bitcoin mining rigs. After a staged lunch at the Rosewood Hotel, he was handed a cash-filled envelope and later found himself transferring around $220,000 worth of bitcoin to a wallet via Atomic Wallet, only to see the funds vanish within minutes.

The episode unfolded over a sequence of in-person meetings, including a later dinner at the Okura Hotel, with scammers aiming to gain his trust before triggering the theft. Blockchain researchers from Chainalysis and CertiK traced the funds as they moved through multiple addresses and exchanges, complicating attempts to recover them, and noted the attacker’s use of a sophisticated, surveillance-style approach.

While initial thoughts touched on a 2023 North Korea-linked hack, WIRED reports that investigators view Halliburton’s loss as a well-orchestrated con involving seed-phrase capture and a possible “sweeper script” to drain the wallet, with law enforcement involvement limited to a few agencies.