Ever considered yourself unlucky? Well, consider this: 39-year-old Welsh IT engineer James Howells (pictured) has lost almost $650 million (£535m). Even worse, he thinks he knows exactly where his fortune is – he’s just not allowed to retrieve it.  

What happened to James is the stuff of nightmares. It's the story of 8,000 Bitcoins worth around $80,000 (£65k) each, the hard drive that stores them… and over a million tonnes of rubbish… 

It’s 11 years since James had his stroke of bad luck, but he’s not giving up. Read on to discover his agonising story – and his tireless campaign to get his money back.

All dollar amounts in US dollars.

James was one of the very earliest adopters of the cryptocurrency Bitcoin. He believes he was among a group of just five people who first installed special software to 'mine' the coins by getting his computer to solve highly complex mathematical problems. 

Nowadays, these tasks require a lot of energy to complete, and it costs huge amounts of money to mint a new Bitcoin. At the time James started mining, though, it was cheap. His computer worked day and night. Eventually, his then-partner Hafina asked him to stop mining because the laptop fan kept her awake at their home in Newport, South Wales. 

By then, he'd created some 8,000 Bitcoins in return for about £10 worth of electricity – the equivalent of around £16 ($19) today. The cryptocurrency itself was of practically no value at all – for now.

One day, James spilled lemonade on his laptop. It never worked properly again. He was good with computers, so he stripped it down for spares and sold some of the parts. Others he threw away, while keeping the most important piece of kit: the hard drive. 

As for his data, he copied most of it onto an Apple computer. However, one item – the 64-character passkey for his Bitcoins – wasn’t compatible with that machine, so he left it on the laptop hard drive which he now stored in a drawer. 

An unremarkable-looking grey metal box similar to the one pictured, it sat there for three years, alongside another hard drive. James thought little about it as he was busy raising a family with Hafina. But people outside the tech world were starting to notice Bitcoin, and demand for it was on the rise.

In August 2013, James decided he needed to declutter and tidied his home office.  

Some items ended up in black plastic bags that he put in his hallway. These included one of the two hard drives from his desk drawer. That night, he asked Hafina if she’d take some of the bags to the local dump. She said no and he thought no more of it. But the following day, on her way back from taking the kids to school, she disposed of the sacks after all. 

James then made a dreadful discovery: he'd put the wrong hard drive in the bag. The scale of his mistake soon dawned on him when he read a news item about a Norwegian man who’d bought an apartment with his Bitcoin profits. Going online, he saw that his own stash was worth around £500,000 ($606k). But the key to it was now in the trash. 

James quickly worked out that his hard drive would have ended up in Newport’s Docksway landfill site (pictured). But locating it would be like finding a needle in a haystack; the drive is about the size of an iPhone, and the facility contains some 1.4 million tonnes of rubbish.

As soon as possible, James met with the local authority to ask if they could recover the drive, but those efforts came to nothing. The drive would likely have gone through waste compactors that could have crushed it or even broken it into pieces. But one tiny file on the device might, possibly, have survived intact. If so, it's been growing more valuable by the day. 

Although Bitcoin’s notoriously volatile, it was rising fast in 2013. Just three months after accidentally throwing away his security key, James’s 8,000 coins soared in value to around the £4 million ($4.85m) mark. 

In recent years, Bitcoin’s value has risen exponentially. Despite some huge crashes along the way, it’s climbed to record highs. On 4 December 2024, the price of one Bitcoin broke the $100,000 (£82,492) barrier. It's bounced around a little since then, but some people expect it to appreciate even further in the long term. 

The catalyst for its most recent surge is Donald Trump's election to a second term as president of the United States. Trump’s promised to make the US a "crypto capital of the planet", and he’s nominated the crypto-friendly Paul Atkins as Securities and Exchange Commissioner. That means the federal government will likely allow a more relaxed regulatory environment than it did under President Biden. 

Bitcoin seems to have a fantastic present and the prospect of an even more gilded future. For James Howells, however, the only thing that’s growing is the agony of his misfortune. 

As the years went on, James assembled a crack team (pictured, alongside TV presenter Richard Hammond) to help recover his hard drive. With a US hedge fund backing them, they worked free of charge, on the understanding that if they dug it up, they’d share the spoils. 

The group included an Artificial Intelligence expert capable of using robots to sift through tonnes of excavated rubbish. Environmental consultants said they could restore and actually improve the landfill site after any dig. There was a legal team on hand – and even someone who was once in charge at the landfill site. 

James also secured the help of data recovery specialists. If they could only find the hard drive, they say there’s a high likelihood they could retrieve the digital key to his Bitcoins. In the past, the same people have salvaged data from deep-sea dives, airliner black boxes, and even the Columbia space shuttle that crashed to Earth in 2003. 

The team said it would take at least 18 months to conduct a search for the missing drive, and possibly as long as three years. But they offered to share the rewards. Among the goodies was a 10% cut to Newport City Council, which James said could help transform the area (pictured) – one of Britain’s most economically-deprived.

Previously, James has also spoken of giving every Newport resident a fixed sum in Bitcoin, and of launching community projects like a business fund to regenerate the local economy. 

All he needed to unlock this largesse was the local authority’s permission to excavate the Docksway landfill site. The team claims to know exactly where to look: a section of the facility called Cell 2/Area 2, which narrows down the search enormously. Unfortunately, Newport City Council has always seen things differently…

The council insists digging up its refuse site is not possible. It says it’s bound by the law and that environmental regulations do not allow it to disrupt landfill in such a case. Its lawyer has argued that James’s offer to share any recovered proceeds is tantamount to a bribe and that he was trying to buy something the council isn’t in a position to sell. 

What’s more, it says anything sent to landfill is legally its own property in any case. And that only it has the legal authority to excavate at Docksway. 

The council’s also worried about third-party treasure hunters trespassing at its rubbish dump, hoping to dig up the missing hard drive for themselves. It’s had to increase security at the site, and officials say the whole issue has distracted from the council’s public duties. 

James filed a High Court lawsuit against Newport City Council for almost £500 million ($606m) for withholding what he claims is his property. In December, the council sought to have his claim dismissed before reaching the higher court. The judge reserved judgment until a later date – but now, he’s spoken…

The ruling came on 9 January and it’s a huge blow for James. It states that he has no realistic prospect of success in suing the council and therefore he cannot go ahead to trial. There were obvious practical reasons, said the judge, for the council refusing to allow an excavation. He also agreed that the hard drive itself is now legally the council’s property. 

The situation looks bleaker than ever. You would be forgiven for thinking that the whole matter is now done and dusted. But James is not a quitter…

James believes the judge’s comments about ownership of the hard drive might offer a glimmer of hope. The judge ruled that the drive belongs to the council – but he didn’t say the same of the bitcoins themselves. If James is recognised as their legal owner, then he’ll propose a new scheme.

This would be a brand-new cryptocurrency, using the value of his ‘buried’ bitcoins as its backing, much as gold stored in vaults once backed up paper currency. He says his inability to access the bitcoin would actually be a benefit rather than a problem, since it would ensure that nobody could ever interfere with it. 

And that's not the only option he's considering. James has also revealed he's discussed buying the landfill site outright with the backing of his investment partners. The council has indeed earmarked the tip for closure in the coming years and has planning permission to build a solar farm on the site. Could the stars be aligning for James to finally retrieve his treasure? Watch this space.

Want to hunt for your own treasure? Discover the rivers where you can still pan for gold