According to the article ‘the Australian Federal Police (AFP) will allege that an analytics specialist from the AFP’s Criminal Assets Confiscation Taskforce deciphered Mr Jung’s cryptocurrency account’s “seed phrase”.’
The word ‘decipher’ is doing a lot of heavy lifting. I’m wondering if they socially engineered or just found it written somewhere in the house?
Anyway, curious as to how they did it.
He was being intimidated by men with guns. I suspect he probably willingly gave it up. Or it was written down somewhere, as you mentioned. Either that or he had it stored rather insecurely on his device such as in a notes app or something.
The old password deciphering wrench attack. https://xkcd.com/538/