A 24-word recovery phrase is the wallet. If that phrase is written into a file someone else controls, confidentiality is already lost, even when you still hold another copy and even before any coins move.
That is the holding concern in a case TechFlow reported on 11 November 2026. The outlet cited a 9 November announcement by the Dutch Public Prosecution Service (Openbaar Ministerie, OM). Prosecutors asked a court to sentence a former investigator of the Royal Netherlands Marechaussee (Koninklijke Marechaussee, KMar) to six months in prison. They allege he used official access to police systems without authorization and took cryptocurrency worth more than €6,000 from a traveler. The court had not ruled when TechFlow published.
What prosecutors allege
As TechFlow reported from the OM announcement, the suspect in October 2025 queried police systems about a traveler who had been checked at Amsterdam Airport Schiphol. From that traveler’s earlier case records he obtained a 24-word wallet recovery phrase stored there, moved the wallet’s assets to a personal account, exchanged them, and reinvested in other cryptocurrencies.
The investigation also found about 20 later queries of the victim’s police records. The person has been dismissed. Prosecutors also asked that the stolen funds be returned to the victim. Those points are allegations in a prosecution request, not a completed judgment.
Accessibility, confidentiality, and redundancy
Anyone who can read a 24-word phrase can typically restore the wallet and spend what it controls. A copy inside a police case file makes the secret easy for staff, and for anyone who can query those systems, to open. That is accessibility for other people, not a backup for the holder.
Redundancy does not repair a confidentiality failure. An extra copy in an official file is another place the phrase can be read. A holder still needs a copy they can reach in an emergency, a limit on who else can read it, and more than one independent copy so one failure does not erase the record. Those are three different jobs. An official database can be easy for employees to open and still be a poor place for a seed phrase.
Moving or exchanging the coins afterward does not put the phrase back under the holder’s control. Dismissal and a request for repayment are also separate from whether the phrase remains exposed in records. No custody habit removes the risk that a phrase, once copied into a system other people can query, can be reused.
Checks this report supports
Nothing here asks you to share a seed phrase:
- Treat a 24-word recovery phrase as confidential. It does not belong in travel, incident, or case paperwork.
- If a phrase has already been written into someone else’s file or system, assume it may have been read. Retiring it usually means moving funds to a new wallet with a new phrase. This report does not say what the traveler did after the alleged theft.
- Separate who can reach a backup, who else can read it, and whether you have more than one independent copy.
- Job access is not the same as permission to use that access. The allegation is unauthorized querying, including about 20 further lookups of the same records.
TechFlow’s 11 November 2026 report, based on the OM announcement of 9 November, is the source for the requested six-month sentence, the claim of more than €6,000, the October 2025 timing, the Schiphol check, the 24-word phrase taken from earlier case records, the later queries, the dismissal, and the request that funds be returned. The article does not report a court verdict.
Original report: TechFlow, 11 November 2026