A Bitcoin wallet seized in South Korea disappeared after the wallet’s recovery phrases were made public.

The South Korean government “stealing” the Bitcoin it seized is not a simple clerical mistake. It is the clearest evidence of how traditional state bureaucracy can be defeated by the nature of cryptocurrencies.
Police procedures are clear: every seized object, every scrap of paper is photographed as evidence and attached to the government’s official report. The officer running the case treated that 12-word note not as the thing itself, but as a standard document for the case.
The surprising part—one nobody seems to know—is this: that wallet was probably not emptied by a person. There are OCR (optical character recognition) sweeper bots that scan the internet 24/7. The moment a photo drops online or into an open database, the software reads those words in milliseconds, scans the network, and automatically transfers all funds in the wallet to its own addresses.
No matter how tightly that paper is locked inside the government-sealed evidence bag, it doesn’t matter. The blockchain always works faster than cumbersome bureaucracy.