I came across the post on Reddit about a guy that took this hard drive that he stored his bitcoin to a data recovery specialist to fix it, who told him that his 276 bitcoin has been stolen, wait a minute how, his hard drive was bad and gave it to you to fix it and then you told him it was stolen.
It's a shame how people would still act so unwise with their holdings, I know its not his fault that his hard drive got bad but at least he should have taken some measures to secure his holdings, and now there is no proff that the so called data recovery specialist was the one who stole it or not.
The data recovery specialist is the first suspect I would also point my fingers at. Prior to taken the hard drive for him to repair, if I was very sure that my bitcoin holding was intact and it was just after he repaired it that I found it missing, he will be the first suspect for it. 276 bitcoins is a large amount of money that must have been accumulated through hard work, patient and pains, losing such amount can even cause one paralysis and also mental problem especially if your total wealth savings is all there and your present holdings won’t beat that amount again. I feel so bad for what has happened to him and I hope this will serve as a lesson to others that carelessly handle their holdings in which they have big amount of bitcoins saved in.
Your right he is actually the first suspect to look at, but before we point fingers at him I sence a little carelessness from the owner of the bitcoin, for instance I can actually take my phone to a software engineer to fix a forgotten password or help me with an issue and in my phone was stored access to my money in my account if he has no idea he eould just fix my phone and give it back to me with no issues, but I think as OP said in one of his comments that the owner must have spilled some information about what I contained in the hard drive to the data recovery guy and that must have triggered him, to be honest who would have access to 276 BTC and nor be tempted, so if my speculation is true then I think the lesson learnt would be not to tell people about your holdings for any reason.