The Forgotten Wallet – $120 Million Lost in a Coffee Shop"

In late 2017, Amir Qureshi, a Pakistani expat living in Dubai, was riding the crypto boom like a wave. An early believer in Ethereum, he had bought 25,000 ETH back in 2015—worth barely a few thousand dollars at the time.$ETH

Fast-forward to 2017: His ETH was now valued at over $120 million. But Amir wasn’t flashy. No Lambos. No villas. He kept his fortune locked away in a hardware wallet—a sleek black USB, protected by a 24-word recovery phrase scribbled onto a paper tucked inside his Moleskine notebook.

One December morning, Amir visited a downtown Dubai café. After hours of chart-checking and portfolio updates, he left his bag on the chair for "just a moment" while he went to the restroom.

When he returned… the bag was gone.

The CCTV? Blurry. The suspect? Never caught. The notebook? Gone. The USB? Gone.

Amir spent months working with private investigators. He offered a $10 million reward, hired cyber-forensics teams, and even tried to bribe low-level hackers to brute-force access (impossible, unless you had the recovery phrase). Nothing worked.

In 2023, he spoke publicly for the first time in a TEDx talk titled: “I Was a Millionaire for a Moment.”

To this day, the wallet sits on the Ethereum blockchain. The funds untouched. A digital monument to one man’s loss.

> “The cruel truth about crypto,” Amir says, “is that it's not lost in the system. It's lost to you.”