Rhonda Kampert was one of the pioneers.
She bought six bitcoins in 2013, when they cost around $80 dollars each and they were the talk of a niche on the internet.
“I used to listen to a talk show on the radio and they started talking about cryptocurrencies and bitcoin, so I got interested,” he says.
“Back then, it was very difficult to buy them, but I worked my way up and managed to get my hands on some coins.”
Rhonda, from Illinois in the midwestern United States, spent some of her digital money for the next year and then forgot about it.
He didn’t remember until the end of 2013, when he read those headlines announcing that the value of bitcoin had reached $16,000. She excitedly ran to her computer to log in and withdraw the money.
But there was a problem: she was missing some data to access your digital wallet, a program or device that stores a series of secret numbers or private keys.
“I noticed that, in the printout, my wallet identifier was missing some digits. I had a piece of paper with my password, but I had no idea what my wallet ID was,” says Rhonda.
“It was horrible. I tried everything for months, but to no avail. So I gave up.”
Digital Treasure Hunters
In the spring of 2021, the value of bitcoin had exceeded $50,000, more of 600 times what Rhonda had paid eight years earlier. With a renewed determination to find her coins, she went online and found those who call themselves “bitcoin hunters”, two digital treasure hunters: Chris and Charlie Brooks, father and son.
“After talking online for a while, I trusted into them enough to give them all the details he could remember. And I kept waiting, “she says.
At the time they made a video call, during which they accessed the wallet. “Chris opened it and there they were. I was so relieved!”
The three and a half bitcoins that were there were then worth $83,000.
“After giving Chris and Charlie his 10%, the first thing I did was withdraw $10,000 to help my daughter Megan with college expenses”.
It has the rest stored in a hardware wallet, a physical security device, similar to a USB stick, that stores your keys offline.
Today each of your digital coins is worth $43, and wait that increase in value. It’s his retirement fund for when he decides to retire from trading cryptocurrencies and stocks, he says.
Billions lost
But there are many who, like Rhonda, need help. An estimate by expert cryptocurrency analytics firm Chainalysis suggests that of the 18, 9 million bitcoins in circulation, owners have lost up to 3.7 million. And since in the decentralized world of cryptocurrency no one is in charge, if someone forgets their wallet keys, there aren’t many places they can go. Chris and Charlie figure that services like theirs, which use computers to test hundreds of thousands of possible login ID and password combinations, they could recover 2.5% of the lost bitcoins, worth about $3,900 millions. Chris set up his business, Crypto Asset Recovery, in 900, but left it for a while to focus on other projects. It was a conversation he had with his son Charlie a little over a year ago that prompted him to get it going again. “I was on a break from college and had traveled a bit, and I sat down with my dad to talk about business ideas,” says Charlie, who has 20 years. “We came up with the idea of getting the business up and running again, so over the next few weeks we brought in the internal servers and turned everything back on.”
They set up the office in their house by the sea, in the state of New Hampshire, and after bitcoin peaked in November 2021, father and son began to receive more than 100 emails and calls per day from potential clients.
Now the pace has slowed down, but they work on the cases that had accumulated.
The business is going so well that Charlie has no intention of finishing his computer science degree.
However, the two joke that they spend their time in perpetual disappointment.
Because of their clients’ bad memory or confusing paperwork, the clues lead them to solve only the 20% of cases.
Even then , they are often disappointed by what they find.
“Most of the time we cannot know what is inside the wallet, so we have to trust the client and that there will be a amount worth the work”, says Charlie.
“In the summer a person told us that he had his wallet bitcoins. We were very professional with him, obviously, but behind the screen we shook hands, excited about what we would receive on payment day”, he recalls.
“We passed 60 hours on the server, plus a few 10 with the client, to gather clues. But when we opened the wallet during the video call, it was empty.”
Chris and Charlie say that only one of his clients underestimated what was inside his wallet. It turned out to be his biggest loot so far: $100,02 in bitcoins.
In the last year they say they have recovered bitcoins for a total value of “ 7 digits”.
Hardware piracy
The father and son team is one of many in a growing industry of “hackers ethical“who use their skills to help people recover lost cryptocurrencies.
Joe Grand does too is. He started hacking as a teenager and is well known in the hacker community for testifying before the United States Senate in 1998 about the first internet exploits under his username, Kingpin.
He recently made a viral video on YouTube about how he opened a hardware wallet containing $2 million worth of a cryptocurrency called theta.
It took Joe months of preparation and practice hacking with other such wallets to find a method in his workshop in Portland, Oregon.
Finally succeeded in combining two previously discovered vulnerabilities with the wallet in question, showing that they can “fail” and reveal their PIN code if attacked with carefully timed electrical shocks.
“When you break a crypto wallet, actually when you break any security device, it feels like magic. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it”, he assures.
“Although I had shown several times in my tests that I could hack this wallet, that day I was worried because you never know what is going to happen and you just we had a chance; if it went wrong the coins would be lost forever”.
“Opening the wallet was a great adrenaline rush. I guess it’s like a technical version of a scavenger hunt. “Joe’s day job is teaching manufacturers how to protect their products from hackers, but he says he now gets a lot of calls from people hoping to get their lost crypto back.” If there are wallets big enough and treasure big enough to spend my time on,” he says, “then let’s give it a try.”
Tea May be of interest:
Bitcoin scam and millionaire laundering: husbands arrested in New York for amounts “never seen” by the Department of Justice
Owning cryptocurrencies can make you more attractive on dating platforms
Young people about to lose $2 million for forgetting their cryptocurrency wallet PIN: a hacker helps them recover it
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