Before its rightful owner realized his bitcoin had been stolen, the Canadian’s cryptocurrency was already in Nebraska.
From there, it moved to a second exchange — the cryptocurrency equivalent of a bank, this one headquartered at the time in Seychelles, the remote African nation in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
Inside a crypto wallet hosted on that exchange sat the nearly $100,000 in bitcoin the Toronto investor had been tricked into handing over to a purported financial adviser.
But the trail had hit a seemingly impenetrable wall. Neither the investor nor the experts he had hired could see who was behind the wallet holding his fortune.
In late 2023, a discovery in an European court changed everything. It wasn’t a…