Woman accidentally threw away boyfriend's $714,000,000 Bitcoin fortune and he's still not over it
Topics: News, World News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Wales
Gerrard Kaonga
Featured Image Credit: BBC News/VCG/VCG via Getty Images
Topics: News, World News, Bitcoin, Cryptocurrency, Wales
Halfina Eddy Evans has finally broken her silence about her boyfriend's lost fortune, and she's tired of hearing about it.
You might not know his name, but you have likely heard his story on social media at some point or another, as it is quite tragic.
In a different timeline, James Howells is living the high life and enjoying his Bitcoin fortune, but not in this one.
The IT engineer, from Newport, Wales, says 8,000 Bitcoins were stored on the hard drive that his partner accidentally threw out - with the cryptocurrency worth an eye-watering amount today.
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Soon after realizing his partner had accidentally ditched the hard drive at Newport City Council's landfill site, Howells immediately called the council and asked to come and retrieve it, but they said no.
Howells hasn’t been playing around though and has resolved to sue the council for $648 million for not allowing him to retrieve it. He even reportedly hired NASA data recovery engineers to pinpoint where the hard drive may be.
His partner at the time who threw out the fortune, Halfina Eddy Evans, has spoken out about the incident and said it was her boyfriend who asked her to take his stuff to the dump in the first place.
In an interview with the Mail Online, Eddy-Evans insisted she didn’t want a penny from the fortune but wanted her ex-partner to find it.
She said: “I hope he finds it, not that I want a penny of his money, but it will shut him up!
“Yes, I threw away his rubbish, he asked me to.
“The computer part had been disposed of in a black sack along with other unwanted belongings and he begged me to take it away, saying ‘there's a bag of rubbish here to be taken to the tip.’
“'I had no idea what was in it but I reluctantly dropped it off at the local tip on the way home from going on the school run.
“I thought he should be running his errands, not me, but I did it to help out. Losing it was not my fault.”
It’s not clear whether Howells will actually ever get his Bitcoins back, however.
A spokesman for Newport Council said the council has told Howells 'multiple times' an excavation is 'not possible under our environmental permit and that work of that nature would have a huge negative environmental impact on the surrounding area' and that it's the 'only body authorized to carry out operations on the site' and 'follows a strict monitoring and reporting regime for all environmental parameters'.