How a Hacker and the Czech Justice Minister Split a Billion Crowns in Bitcoin
I read about this in the Czech magazine Respekt. Here is the article: https://www.respekt.cz/kontext/jak-pavel-blazek-k-miliarde-prisel-a-my-s-nim
Who’s who
This story is about two people: Pavel Blažek, the Czech justice minister, and Tomáš Jiříkovský, a young man from Břeclav. Jiříkovský was unknown until he suddenly became rich. The two never met, but their stories became linked. How this happened shows what can go wrong when law, politics, and technology mix.
Jiříkovský started as a locksmith. He switched to programming because it paid better. He also did not mind breaking the law. In 2013, after seeing Silk Road (a darknet drug market), he made his own site: Sheep Marketplace. On darknet markets, people buy and sell things with bitcoin. The site takes a cut. Everyone tries to stay hidden.
At first, it worked. Then police shut down Silk Road, and its users moved to Sheep Marketplace. The money grew fast. The site held about two billion crowns in bitcoin (about $100 million then). But then hackers stole more than 5,000 bitcoins. Jiříkovský closed the site and kept what was left: 840 bitcoins, about 16 million crowns ($800,000).
He tried to clean the money. Some went to his wife’s bank, some to real estate, some to cars. Police noticed and arrested him in 2016. They took his computers and guns but never found the bitcoins. He had encrypted everything, and they could not get in.
Later, investigators linked Jiříkovský to Sheep Marketplace. He was found guilty of drug dealing, fraud, and having illegal weapons. He got nine years in prison.
Enter the minister
Now to Pavel Blažek. He says he heard about Jiříkovský in 2022 from a lawyer friend. By then, Jiříkovský was out of prison. He was suing the state to get his computers back. He said they held keys to bitcoin wallets that had grown in value while he was in jail.
Bitcoin’s price had jumped about 122 times since 2016. Even if Jiříkovský did not know how many bitcoins he had, everyone knew it was now worth a lot.
Jiříkovský hired a lawyer named Kárim Titz, who had political connections. Lower courts said he could get his computers back, but only if the data was wiped. But in 2022, the Supreme Court said seized property must be returned unless it was proven to be used in a crime. Even after a sentence is served.
So Jiříkovský would get his computers back, with whatever was still on them.
The deal
Then things got strange.
After the court ruling in January, Titz made Blažek an offer. If the Justice Ministry helped Jiříkovský unlock his computers and bitcoin wallet, Jiříkovský would give 30% of what they found to the state.
Blažek did not think there would be a billion crowns. He assumed: perhaps tens of millions. Still, it was tempting. What minister would not want extra money for the budget? He checked with financial regulators and found no legal risks. He agreed.
The plan was simple: Ministry staff, a court IT expert, and a notary would attend the wallet opening. Whatever was found would be split as agreed.
On March 7, everyone went to an office in Prague. But when Blažek’s deputy and the notary arrived at 9am, Jiříkovský’s team had already been there for hours. They said they had found 1,561 bitcoins (worth over three billion crowns = roughly $150 million) and gave a printout as proof. The notary recorded it. One third of the bitcoins went to a government wallet.
The Justice Ministry started selling their share right away.
There’s more to this
First: Why did Jiříkovský need the state? He could have opened his wallet at home. Most likely, he wanted to make some of his bitcoins look legal by working with the government. Or maybe he wanted protection. People from darknet markets have dangerous enemies.
Second: Blockchain experts later found that on March 6, the day before the meeting, lots of bitcoin moved from wallets linked to Sheep Marketplace and another site, Nucleus Marketplace. Nucleus was tied to even worse crimes. These wallets had been quiet since 2016, the year Jiříkovský went to jail.
So when Jiříkovský’s team worked on the computers “for thirty hours” before the notary arrived (which experts say makes no sense), they were likely moving money from many places. They probably cleaned money for others before giving a clean share to the state.
No one knows how much was moved. It could be another billion crowns or more.
Aftermath
Blažek says he did not know where the money came from or that there were more wallets. When asked about risks for himself or his party, he said he was not worried. Bitcoin is not like other crime money.
Maybe that is true. But everyone got something: Jiříkovský got safety and clean bitcoins; the Justice Ministry got extra money; lawyers and experts got paid; and the public saw how digital money moves through gaps in law and tech.
What about the victims of Sheep or Nucleus Marketplace? They are still out there, watching their coins move from one hidden wallet to another, sometimes right under the state’s nose.
This story shows how systems mix. When rules are unclear, some people win. Sometimes that means making your own darknet market. Sometimes it means knowing when to ask for your computers back.