PANews reported on February 25 that according to The Block, James Howells, an IT engineer from Newport who lives in Newport, South Wales, believed that his ex-partner mistakenly threw away his hard drive containing Bitcoin and took legal action, trying to enter the local landfill or ask the Newport City Government for compensation of 495 million pounds (609 million US dollars).

Mark Hall, a waste management expert at Business Waste, said that the probability of finding a hard drive lost in a landfill is only 0.00000011%. Hall also said that the chance of recovering the Bitcoin itself is basically zero. "The hard drive has been exposed to the wind, rain, leachate, heat, and compression - we highly doubt it can be recovered, so we estimate the chance of recovery to be 0%."