When crypto users lose their private keys or get scammed out of their coins by a con artist, they usually cannot recover their funds. In most cases, their crypto is lost forever. But according to a father and son team that operates out of New Hampshire, all hope is not lost. They claim to have recovered more than $6 million worth of lost crypto throughout their careers.
Chris and Charles Brooks run Crypto Asset Recovery, a service that helps crypto users recover lost wallets. They also provide scam tracking for victims of crypto theft.
In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Chris, the father of co-founder Charles, said that about 70% of the duo’s clients come to them after losing their Bitcoin (BTC) wallet password. These users sometimes have no seed word backups, so if they lose their password, their wallets are difficult to recover without the help of a specialist.
“The BIP39 recovery seed [generated by most modern wallets] was only proposed in 2013, and it didn’t start getting wide adoption until 2015. 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 cases, if a user forgets their password, they lose access to their wallet since they don’t have any seed word backups they can use to restore it. Even so, Chris claimed that most of these wallets can still be recovered using software that guesses the password through brute force.
Even if a user has a seed word backup, they may have made a mistake when copying it down. For example, they may have left one word out, or they may be getting an error when they attempt to enter the words. Chris said he could often recover these wallets as well by brute-forcing the missing word or the correct order of words.
Charles said he recently helped a “Casascius coin” collector recover his lost wallet key. A Casascius coin is a physical coin that carries a Bitcoin private key inside of a film on its back side. The private key is only 26 to 36 characters long instead of the usual 51 characters. On the front side of the coin is the first eight characters of the Bitcoin address that corresponds to its key.
According to Charles, the collector had accidentally ripped part of the coin’s film, causing “5 or 6 characters” to become illegible. Using the remaining characters and the snippet of the Bitcoin address from the front of the coin, Charles was able to use software to guess the missing characters to the private key.
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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, “we 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.”
In contrast to crypto lost from a forgotten password, Charles cautioned that scammed funds are usually gone forever. The only sliver of hope of recovering them is by involving police and the courts, he explained:
“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.”
Even so, some crypto users may benefit from being able to trace stolen funds and provide a report to the police, he claimed. Charles stated that law enforcement is working on a few cases that the team has reported, but so far, none have concluded.
The duo claimed they’ve recovered $6 million in crypto lost through forgotten passwords, missing seed words and other issues. “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.”
Crypto users have lost billions of dollars from forgetting passwords and losing seed words over the years. According to an estimate from Chainalysis, over 20% of the Bitcoin supply is in wallets no longer under the control of any person.