Newport man who threw away hard drive containing bitcoin worth £210m will pay £50m to dig up landfill site

An IT engineer who claims he accidentally threw away a hard drive containing £210m worth of bitcoin is appealing to his local council to help him find the missing device.

James Howells, 35, said he disposed of what he thought was an empty hard drive in 2013 after having a clear out, only to subsequently realise he had discarded a device containing 7,500 bitcoin.

The panicked computer expert, from Newport, has pleaded with his city council multiple times over the years to allow him to dig up part of the landfill site where he believes the equipment could be languishing. Now he has offered Newport City Council 25 per cent of his possible fortune – around £52.5m – in exchange for letting him try to locate the buried treasure.

Landfill appeal

“The way the landfill operated in 2013 was when a general waste bin was full, it was given a serial number, it was dragged off to the open pit and it was buried. It was also given a grid reference number,” Mr Howell said.

“So if I could access the landfill records I could identify the week that I threw the hard drive away, I could identify the serial number of the bin that it was in, and then I could identify where the grid reference is located.”

Request denied

Newport City Council has once again refused to accommodate Mr Howell’s request though.

It said in a statement: “Newport City Council has been contacted a number of times since 2014 about the possibility of retrieving a piece of IT hardware said to contain Bitcoins.

“The first time was several months after Mr Howells first realised the hardware was missing.

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“The cost of digging up the landfill, storing and treating the waste could run into millions of pounds – without any guarantee of either finding it or it still being in working order.

“The council has also told Mr Howells on a number of occasions that excavation is not possible under our licencing permit and excavation itself would have a huge environmental impact on the surrounding area.

“Even if we were able to agree to his request, there is the question of who would meet the cost if the hard drive was not found or was damaged to such an extent that the data could not be recovered.

“We have, therefore, been clear that we cannot assist him in this matter.”

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