They washed the pillow that had the secret phrase to his 7.4 Bitcoin.

Meet Mark Frauenfelder, an American tech journalist and founder of Boing Boing.
January 2016.
Spend $3,000to buy 7.4 Bitcoin
The price doubled and he got serious with them.
Moved everything to a Trezor hardware wallet.
Wrote his 24-word seed phrase and PIN on an orange sticky note.
Planned to etch them onto a metal bar later for safety, but never did.
March 2017, he and his wife plan a trip to Tokyo.
Afraid that something might happen to his Bitcoins, he hid the sticky note under his daughter's pillow.
Came back in April but to his shock, the house had been cleaned.
The note was in a bin somewhere completely faded.
Tried to remember the pin, but didn't work.
Trezor doubles the waiting time after every wrong attempt.
Mark did the math
100 wrong guesses would take 80 years.
Jumped on reddit to look for a solution, but nothing for him still.
Went ahead to hire a hypnotist.
Sat in a session, eyes closed, trying to mentally replay the moment he wrote the PIN.
Felt calm and saw hope coming but he still left the session with nothing.
His $3K in BTC was now $30K and price was increasingly going up but he couldn't touch them.
Then one day Trezor sent an email to all users. A security vulnerability had been discovered in older firmware.
The update cautioned them to update immediately or risk being hacked. For Mark, that was the opening.
A friend connected him to Saleem Rashid, a 15-year-old hacker from the UK.
Saleem had already figured out how to exploit the exact vulnerability Trezor was trying to patch.
He recorded a full step-by-step process.
He charged Mark $4,000 for access to it.
Mark bought a second Trezor.
He practiced the exploit on the new device.
He tried , followed every step, the PIN came back. The 24 words came back.
$30,000 retrieved!
Bro got his fortune back. Today it's worth around $562,000.
Lesson in there, don't ever write your recovery phrase on a single paper.