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One of the oldest wallets on the Bitcoin network moved over $400 million BTC after a curious legal challenge by an entity claiming to be Salomon Brothers.
Funded with 4,000 BTC on June 27, 2011 when 1 coin was worth just $17, the wallet had ballooned from less than $70,000 to over $400 million by the time it received this on-chain message.
Specifically, someone gave the wallet 0.0003 BTC (about $30) in order to publish three OP_RETURN output messages on June 30, July 2, and July 8. Certain types of OP_RETURN outputs display as plain text on block explorers like Mempool.space.
These three messages claimed to be a legal notice, instructing the recipient to visit a webpage.
‘Constructive possession’ of billions of dollars
On that webpage, the authenticity of which Protos can not verify, text claims that a client of the once-great Wall Street institution is taking “constructive possession” of the wallet.
It claims the wallet is abandoned, provides a 90-day notice period, and makes various other demands.
That deadline of October 10, if it actually is an authentic deadline, elapsed before the wallet moved 4,000 BTC on October 23.
Constructive possession is a legal term and refers to “the right to obtain physical control and/or a variety of rights over someone else’s physical control of that property.”
Of course, it’s unclear whether the notice constitutes legal service of information at all.
Read more: Mt. Gox wallet with 80,000 BTC attacked via OP_RETURN message
The entity publishing OP_RETURN messages dusted over 39,000 dormant wallets with BTC repossession notices, including one wallet that possessed over $8 billion.
To date, no US court has ever ruled on the ability to repossess old BTC for simply broadcasting messages into old wallets.
Do not visit suspicious Salomon Brothers websites
Despite repeated attempts to contact executives of Salomon Brothers, Protos has been unable to verify whether these actions are actually the work of Salomon Brothers or someone else attempting to use its brand.
Salomon Brothers once rebranded to Salomon Encore, changed executives, and migrated websites several times over the years.
In addition, the website once contained an elementary grammatical error and other red flags of phishing campaigns.
BitMEX Research, a Bitcoin historian, was also unconvinced that the authentic Salomon Brothers company controlled the website.
As with any suspicious web link, Protos doesn’t recommend viewing or visiting any unsolicited webpage. User information obtained from the website could be used for phishing, social engineering, or physical threats.
Read more: ‘Salomon Brothers’ returns — with a $279B bitcoin dusting scheme
In any case, the movement of large quantities of 14-year-old BTC, especially BTC targeted by an suspicious repossession attempt on-chain, logged a curiosity for Bitcoin historians.
As modern courts and users of the Bitcoin network attempt to understand who controls some of the largest BTC wallets, the Salomon Brothers-branded OP_RETURN incidents of 2025 are certainly an interesting case study.
