When wildfires swept through central Spain, tens of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes in a hurry to save their lives. Rescue workers and police drove through the streets of the villages of Chapinería, Colmenar del Arroyo and Navas del Rey, urging residents to leave their homes immediately and evacuate. According to official reports from the Spanish authorities, the number of people evacuated far exceeded 20,000.
This is exactly what Antonio did, a resident of one of the villages near Madrid. Together with his wife Lucía, his daughter María and her Doberman Pinscher, he left his home in a matter of minutes. The family found themselves among hundreds of other evacuees at the sports complex in the town of Villamanta, where a unit of the UME (Military Emergency Unit) was providing people with water, food, medicines and blankets.
For the first three days, the family hardly slept – the evacuees were glued to the fire service updates, trying to work out whether their home had survived. When the authorities allowed them to return briefly, Antonio saw that the fire had spared his home. However, it was obvious that someone had been inside the house. Costume jewellery was scattered across the bedroom floor, but the real jewellery and some of the cash had disappeared. At first glance, it looked like a common burglary, the sort people often fear during mass evacuations. But he only realised the true extent of his loss later.
Antonio had been investing in blockchain for many years, specifically in Bitcoin and Ethereum. He kept the bulk of his assets on a hardware crypto wallet, considering it one of the safest ways to protect digital assets. In his haste to leave, he had left his backup seed phrase—which allows full access to the crypto wallet to be restored—in the top drawer of his desk. The piece of paper with the words written on it went missing.
Just a minute after checking his cold wallet, the man realised that his Bitcoin and Ethereum had been transferred to other addresses. The funds were then quickly moved through a series of new crypto wallets. Although the police took a statement regarding the theft, digital forensics experts emphasised that, in cases where a seed phrase is compromised, a criminal does not need to break the encryption system or bypass the blockchain’s security. After all, it is enough to obtain the recovery words to restore the wallet on another device and gain full control over the digital assets.
During large-scale natural disasters, law enforcement agencies focus primarily on rescuing people and containing the danger. Looters searching for abandoned homes often take advantage of this situation. It was only later that information began to emerge about the activities of looters, many of whom were from Russia. They tried by any means possible to gain access to the homes of evacuated local residents with the aim of stealing jewellery, valuables and other items.
Uncontrolled forest fires serve as a reminder not only of the fragility of human life. Antonio and his family found themselves in exactly the same predicament, and his story vividly illustrates another problem that is arising with increasing frequency as cryptocurrency grows in popularity – unlike a bank account, a crypto wallet has no support service that can reverse a transfer or restore access after private keys have been compromised. Furthermore, it also shows that, in emergencies, digital assets can prove just as vulnerable as any other property if their security depends on a single sheet of paper.
