9/11 Families Want a Cut of the 127,271 Bitcoin Seized From LuBian
The families of 9/11 victims have filed a claim on 127,271 Bitcoin that the US government seized from a mining pool called LuBian — the pile at the centre of the Justice Department's largest forfeiture action ever.
The argument: LuBian was Iran
A group of 95 survivors and relatives, known in the case as the Chairnoff Claimants, say they hold judgments worth more than $671 million in compensatory damages against Iran for sponsoring the attack. Their new filing argues LuBian is "an agency or instrumentality of Iran," which under the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act would let them execute on Iranian assets — "notwithstanding any other provision of law."
That Iran link comes from a separate lawsuit filed in December 2025, which describes LuBian as the mining pool of the Iran and China Investment Development Group, an Iranian joint-stock company. The complaint says the group built a large mine in Iran's Rafsanjan special economic zone and grew its pool to at least 127,271 Bitcoin.
Where the coins actually came from
The government's own complaint is more careful. It calls Lubian "a Chinese bitcoin mining operation" with facilities in China and Iran, and says the coins sat in unhosted wallets whose private keys Chen Zhi personally held. For part of its life it was the sixth largest bitcoin mining operation in the world.
Blockchain analysts put the origin of the coins in a December 2020 theft, when someone drained the pool through a weakness in the algorithm LuBian used to generate its cryptographic keys. LuBian controlled almost 6% of global Bitcoin mining before disappearing in February 2021.
Why a crypto reader should care
This is not one clean story about one criminal. It is a queue of claimants — fraud victims, insurers, and several separate groups of terrorism victims — all arguing over the same coins. The government says the stash is not purely mining proceeds either: it includes funds tied to Chen Zhi and Prince Holding Group, plus transfers from centralized exchanges.
The uncomfortable part is that none of this required breaking Bitcoin itself. The keys were held by one person, and that person was the single point of failure. Whatever happens to the 127,271 BTC, that lesson stays true.