Nobody Claimed These 39,069 Bitcoin Wallets For Six Years — Now A Court Will Decide Who Owns Them

The First Amended Complaint, filed May 1, 2026, under index number 153119/2026 and filed through Brooklyn-based law firm Lewis & Lin LLC, lays out one of the most unusual property cases in crypto’s short legal history. Noah Doe is not a hacker. He is not a thief. Under New York Personal Property Law Article 7-B, he is arguing he is a finder — and that title to the abandoned wallets vested in him by operation of law after all reasonable efforts to locate their owners failed.

The story begins in October 2024, when Noah Doe identified what the complaint describes as a security vulnerability affecting digital wallets — a flaw that caused owners to lose their ability to withdraw contents, leading them to abandon the Bitcoin wallets entirely. In response, he developed what the filing calls “the Algorithm” — criteria and methods for identifying wallets meeting the legal standard for abandonment: dormant or inactive for at least five years, self-custodied rather than held by an exchange, and unresponsive through multiple periods of significant cryptocurrency price appreciation that any reasonable owner would have acted on.

Between December 26, 2024 and April 14, 2025, Noah Doe ran his Algorithm and identified three separate batches of found wallets — 1,544 in December, 546 in March, and 39,911 in April — all using his personal computer in New York City. Each time, within days of discovery, he physically brought a USB drive containing the wallet addresses to the NYPD’s 17th Precinct, where officers issued receipts and property invoices, per the complaint. The NYPD took custody of each drive before returning them months later.

What followed was an extensive, documented effort to return the wallets to their owners — conducted entirely at Noah Doe’s personal expense, per the filing. He engaged an independent expert to assess the wallets’ value — concluded at less than $10 at the time of finding given recovery uncertainty — a strategic consultant named Salomon Brothers Strategic Advisors Inc., and a separate cyber and blockchain expert to independently verify the wallets existed on-chain and had been dormant for at least five years.

In late June 2025, the blockchain expert transmitted an OP_RETURN message — a technique that inserts a token into a wallet’s transaction record — to every single found wallet, directing holders to an abandonment notice webpage hosted by Salomon Brothers. The notice gave holders 90 days, until October 10, 2025, to claim ownership.

A global press release followed on August 7, reaching an estimated 820 media outlets across 37 countries and up to 225 million people through direct and secondary impressions, per the complaint. Coverage included CoinDesk, Bitcoinist, Yahoo Finance, and Investing.com. Galaxy Digital separately circulated a report to its clients on the abandonment notice.

Of the 42,001 total wallets found, 2,932 were subsequently removed — including 424 that took on-chain action to demonstrate they had not been abandoned. The remaining 39,069 Bitcoin wallets took no action and are the subject of the lawsuit.

The complaint seeks a declaratory judgment — not damages, not criminal prosecution, but a judicial declaration that Noah Doe and his two assignee companies, identified as ABC Company and XYZ Company, are the legal owners of the 39,069 Abandoned Wallets and their contents under New York Personal Property Law. On December 1, 2025, Noah Doe transferred ownership rights in all but 18 of the wallets to ABC Company, which subsequently transferred 17.7% to XYZ Company. All three plaintiffs are parties to the suit.

This case marks a pivotal and genuinely unprecedented moment for the nascent sector’s intersection with property law. A New York court is now being asked to rule on whether self-custodied Bitcoin wallets — dormant for six years or more, found through a proprietary algorithm, reported to police, and subjected to a year of documented outreach — constitute lost property under existing New York law, and whether their finder can legally claim title. The outcome could establish a legal framework with consequences far beyond this single case.

Cover image from Grok, BTCUSD chart from Tradingview