Users of cryptocurrency typically lose their money when they misplace their private keys or are conned out of their coins by a con artist.Their cryptocurrency is typically gone permanently. However, there is still hope, according to a father-and-son partnership based in New Hampshire.Throughout the course of their careers, they assert to have recovered cryptocurrency valued at over $6 million.Crypto Asset Recovery is a service that Chris and Charles Brooks provide to assist cryptocurrency customers in recovering lost wallets.They also offer victims of cryptocurrency theft fraud tracking services.
About 70% of the clients of Charles Brooks and Chris Brooks come to them after losing their Bitcoin wallet password, according to Chris Brooks, Charles Brooks’ father, in an interview with Cointelegraph.Sometimes these users don’t have backups of their seed words, which makes it hard to retrieve their wallets without a professional’s assistance if they lose their password.
“The BIP39 recovery seed [generated by most modern wallets], was only proposed in 2013 and it didn’t start getting wide adoption until 2015, and so, for folks who have older wallets, that’s not even an option for them,” he stated. Even if a wallet is fairly new, there is still a “handful of wallets where you have to go searching for your seed words if you want to back that up.”
In these situations, a user loses access to their wallet in the event that they forget their password because they do not have backup seed words that they may use to retrieve it.Chris asserted that software that uses brute force password guessing can still be used to retrieve the majority of these wallets.
A user might have copied down the seed word backup incorrectly, even if they have one.For instance, they can be entering the words incorrectly or they might have omitted a word.Chris said that by brute-forcing the missing word or the right word order, he could frequently also retrieve these wallets.
According to Charles Brooks, he recently assisted a collector of “Casascius coins” in finding his misplaced wallet key.A Casascius coin is a tangible coin with a film covering the reverse that contains a Bitcoin private key.Rather than the customary 51 characters, the private key is only 26 to 36 characters long.The first eight characters of the Bitcoin address that match the coin’s key are printed on the front of the coin.Charles claimed that the collector had unintentionally torn a portion of the coin’s film, rendering “5 or 6 characters” unreadable.Charles was able to utilize software to predict the missing characters to the private key by using the remaining characters and the fragment of the Bitcoin address on the front of the coin.
The duo recently launched a scam tracking service for users who have their crypto stolen by con artists. In a case where a client was scammed, “[W]e will take the transaction hashes of [the victim] sending funds to the scammer, [and] we will follow those funds into the scammer’s wallet,” Charles stated. After establishing the scammer’s address or “address cluster,” they will attempt to associate it “with a known entity, which is more often than not an exchange.” Once this entity is known, they will “compile a report and help the client report the case to law enforcement.”
Charles warned that the money obtained through scams is typically lost forever, unlike cryptocurrency that is lost due to a forgotten password.He clarified that the only slim chance of getting them back is by involving the police and the legal system.
“We don’t see much likelihood in recovery of scam cases. Once the funds are in somebody else’s wallet, […] you need to go hunt them down with police and gain access to their Ledger, or whatever is holding it, so we tell [clients] that there is a very low likelihood of recovery.”
Nevertheless, he asserted that some cryptocurrency users might profit from being able to track down pilfered money and notify law enforcement.According to Charles, the team has reported a few situations to law enforcement, but none of these cases have reached a resolution yet.The pair asserted that they had restored $6 million in cryptocurrency that had been lost due to misplaced seed words, forgotten passwords, and other problems.
“We’ve been pretty successful in recovering lost wallets,” Charlie stated. “We have right around a 45% or 46% success rate when somebody needs help with a cracked password, and so over time that has built up.”
Over the years, cryptocurrency users have lost billions of dollars due to seed word and password loss.Over 20% of the Bitcoin supply, according to a Chananalysis estimate, is in wallets that are no longer owned by any one person.