Chris, who wants to remain anonymous, lost access to his digital wallet containing about £4,000 worth of Bitcoin when the trading platform Intersango went bust in 2014.
At the time, the site had more than 5,000 accounts.
It’s believed Bitcoin now potentially worth hundreds of millions of pounds still exists in the accounts of one of the company’s co-founders and could be reclaimed by former users with sufficient proof of ownership.
After several failed attempts to make contact with the company over the years, Chris resigned himself to having lost the cryptocurrency, exclusively telling LBC it was “a punch in the stomach watching Bitcoin go up and up” in value.
But earlier this year he made one more attempt, enlisting the help of lawyers to prove he owned dozens of the “lost” Bitcoin; within months, the coins were returned to him – and are now worth around £3.3 million.
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Chris’s journey started in 2011, when a friend who was “seriously into shares” told him that Bitcoin was going to be a “massive thing,” and eventually convinced him to invest.
He “cautiously” bought £1,500 worth of the cryptocurrency, and “within weeks it was creeping up,” Chris remembers.
The website he bought them through was Intersango, formerly called Britcoin, one of the earliest Bitcoin exchanges in the UK. It launched in July 2011, and quickly attracted thousands of users.
But it got into difficulties in late 2012, and by early 2014, the website went down, and users received no response when they tried to withdraw their funds.
Chris had heard rumours that Intersango was struggling, and tried to get his Bitcoin out.
But when he tried to log in, he found his account had been frozen. The Bitcoin it contained had appreciated in value by that point to around £4,000.
“It was a bit of a shock when it happened. It wasn’t really money that I wanted to lose,” he told LBC.
As Intersango was not regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority, Chris’s recourse was initially limited.
“They had the privilege of just shutting down and walking away from it —which is what they did,” he said.
When Chris initially invested in Bitcoin in 2011, a single Bitcoin was worth just £2.94. At its peak last year, one coin fetched £94,000.
“It was a punch in the stomach watching Bitcoin go up and up. After a while, I stopped watching it because I thought: ‘there’s no point, it’s lost… I had written them off.’”
He said: “The worst thing was… knowing what I could have done with the money.
“I haven’t had much work in the last few years; my son got married, my father-in-law passed away, so my wife had to quit work to look after her mum.
“Both of my parents are in their 80s and have health issues. My children have been through university, my son has bought a house that ended up needing a lot more work than he realised.”
He also says for years his friends would tease him, asking “where his millions had gone to” – comments he would have to “grin and bear.”
The first clue that his Bitcoin still existed came in 2018, when he started to receive emails from two of Intersango’s co-founders, asking former customers who had accounts with them to reach out. But Chris thought they were scam emails, and deleted them.
Earlier this year, though, his wife encouraged him to contact CEL Solicitors, a firm specialising in recovering lost cryptocurrency.
Within months, lawyers managed to regain access to Chris’ lost Bitcoin, now worth £3.3 million, and return it to him.
When he told his family, he says their “jaws dropped, eyes popped,” but they encouraged him not to get too excited “until the Bitcoins actually hit” his wallet.
Even now with the cryptocurrency in his account on an FCA-regulated platform, Chris says he reopens the app to look at the amount “every single day, 20 times a day.”
“I’m still worried about scammers and hackers. You never know what might happen because although the wallet’s there and the exchange that I’m with is regulated, nothing really is regulated for crypto. And so there’s always that danger that someone’s going to hack.”
He says he’s going to keep some of the amount in crypto, but partially cash out to “upgrade to a bigger house so that we are able to better accommodate my mother-in-law and her disabilities.”
After being so cautious to accept that the Bitcoin being returned to him was real, Chris says he hasn’t properly celebrated yet, but is planning to throw a party and go on holiday with his family.
Ryan Sweetnam, Director of Financial Litigation at CEL Solicitors, was able to reunite Chris with his Bitcoin by gathering documentation proving his ownership of the currency.
“We had to get all the court documents sorted for American courts,” he told LBC.
“And so that took quite a long time. But in the end, you could probably describe the whole process as negotiation rather than having to get in front of a judge to get this one user back his funds.”
The three co-founders who started Intersango have been embroiled in a lengthy court battle over the shuttering of the platform, during which it’s been alleged one of the founders is holding 5,500 Bitcoin “worth in the region of £500 million”, at least some of which Sweetnam believes belongs to former UK customers.
Sweetnam says during the litigation, one of the founders confirmed he still held funds which belonged to former Intersango users.
He told LBC: “As I understand it, that was the first time anyone had actually admitted that these assets were still somewhere. No one knew where they were. The company had shuttered years ago, and now here was someone in court going, ‘well, yes, that company has this debt, and I’m still holding all these assets for all these users.'”
He says it’s unlikely they would block the return of the currency: “If they did divvy up the money, each of those founders would be liable for it because they’re holding your actual asset.
“They owe you that debt. And so everything I’ve seen, they’re not doing that. They are trying to come forward; they are trying to repatriate, but it can be a long process.”