A U.S. federal appeals court has denied a Florida man’s request to recover $354 million worth of Bitcoin (BTC) allegedly lost when law enforcement destroyed a hard drive seized during his 2019 arrest.

According to court documents, Michael Prime was arrested for forgery and other crimes, during which agents confiscated several devices — including an orange hard drive that he now claims held the private keys to 3,443 BTC. The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Georgia upheld a previous district court ruling rejecting Prime’s petition to return the property.

The judges ruled that Prime waited too long to file his lawsuit, and that his earlier statements contradicted his current claims. During his probation, Prime had repeatedly told officers he owned “little or no cryptocurrency.” Based on those statements, federal agents ceased their search for Bitcoin-related evidence and eventually destroyed the seized hardware.

In 2020, Prime was sentenced to more than five years in prison for identity theft, forgery, and illegal access to devices. After his release, he claimed the lost Bitcoin keys were on the destroyed drive and filed a Rule 41(g) motion to retrieve the property. However, the court deemed the equipment “lawfully destroyed” and found the motion untimely.

The appellate judges concluded that Prime’s “inexcusable delay” placed the government in an unfair position and ruled that compensation was not justified — “even if the bitcoins really existed.”

This case echoes the story of James Howells from the U.K., who famously lost a hard drive containing 7,500 BTC discarded more than a decade ago.