A Miami man faces a number of felony fees after police say he stole practically $2 million price of Bitcoin from a former employer — a theft that went undetected for years whereas the cryptocurrency sat locked in a protected.
Nahum Reynaldo Castro, 40, was arrested Tuesday on fees of grand theft, cash laundering, illegal use of a communications system, and offenses towards pc customers, in response to an arrest report obtained by NBC 6.
The case stretches again to December 2017, when the sufferer started buying Bitcoin as a long-term funding. He purchased a {hardware} pockets to retailer the digital foreign money, and turned to Castro — a trusted worker since 2013 and an IT specialist — to deal with the pockets’s setup and safety, the report stated.
By the top of January 2018, Castro had secured greater than $217,000 price of Bitcoin on behalf of his employer. The {hardware} pockets was then locked in a protected contained in the sufferer’s house, the place it remained untouched for years.
That modified in July 2025. Whereas in the course of a transfer, the sufferer opened the protected and accessed the pockets — solely to search out it empty. The Bitcoin was gone. On the time of the invention, the stolen holdings had grown to a price of greater than $1.9 million, in response to the arrest report.
Investigators decided the theft had taken place in 2020, greater than 5 years earlier than the sufferer realized something was lacking. Castro continued working for the sufferer till 2024, the report stated.
The wallets seed phrase gave away Castro
Central to the investigation was the pockets’s seed phrase — a grasp restoration key that grants full entry to a cryptocurrency pockets. Based on the report, solely two individuals had data of that phrase: the sufferer and Castro.
Financial institution data proved important in constructing the case. Deposits into Castro’s accounts aligned with withdrawals from the Bitcoin pockets, offering investigators with the monetary corroboration wanted to attach him to the theft, NBC 6 reported.
The case highlights a danger within the cryptocurrency area that safety consultants have lengthy flagged: inserting full belief in a single particular person throughout the setup of a digital asset pockets.
As a result of Bitcoin transactions are recorded on a public blockchain however usually are not reversible, stolen funds are practically unattainable to recuperate with out regulation enforcement intervention.
Castro was booked into jail following his arrest and was set to seem in bond court docket Wednesday. He has not entered a proper plea within the case.
