British woman accidentally throws away her fiance’s £3m Bitcoin wallet

During spring cleaning, UK resident Ellie Hart threw out a USB device with the trash, mistaking it for a regular flash drive. It turned out to be a cryptocurrency wallet on which her fiancé Tom kept funds worth about £3 million ($3.87 million).

Image source: Dmytro Demidko / unsplash.com

The couple say they are struggling to move on with their lives since the incident. “It was just sitting in a drawer with old receipts, dead batteries and tangled wires. I thought it was one of my school flash drives and threw it away without thinking,” the 34-year-old primary school teacher admitted. The terrible truth came out a few days later when the 36-year-old website developer couldn’t find the device and asked his fiancée where it had gone. The woman immediately realized the mistake she had made and told him what she had done.

«We even emptied the garbage bags and tore up the bin liners. It was panic and hope at the same time, but deep down I knew it was too late,” the woman complained. She described the incident as “the worst mistake I’ve ever made.” Tom, a visionary, bought Bitcoin in 2013 when it was much cheaper, and the cryptocurrency on the device has since become a fortune, but without the device, the funds are inaccessible. He didn’t yell at the woman or accuse her of anything, she said, but his silence was telling.

It’s not easy to get over, says Ellie Hart. “You keep replaying it in your head, the moment you picked it up, the second it fell in the bin. I would do anything to fix it. I never thought something valuable could look so mundane. If you keep money or anything valuable on a USB drive, please label it, lock it, don’t make the mistake I did,” she advises.