Key Points
- A father-son duo claims to have recovered over $6 million in lost crypto assets.
- The team also offers a scam tracking service for victims of crypto theft.
Crypto users who lose their private keys or fall victim to scams often face the harsh reality that their funds may be irretrievable. However, a New Hampshire-based father and son team, Chris and Charles Brooks, have provided a glimmer of hope. They assert that they’ve managed to recover more than $6 million worth of lost crypto throughout their careers.
Recovering Lost Crypto
Chris and Charles Brooks operate Crypto Asset Recovery, a service dedicated to assisting crypto users in retrieving lost wallets. The service also provides scam-tracking for those who have fallen prey to crypto theft.
Chris Brooks revealed that about 70% of their clients seek their services after misplacing their Bitcoin wallet password. Some of these users lack seed word backups, making their wallets challenging to recover without professional assistance.
“The BIP39 recovery seed was only proposed in 2013 and didn’t start getting wide adoption until 2015. For those with older wallets, that’s not even an option,” he explained. Even newer wallets can pose difficulties, as users sometimes need to hunt for their seed words to back up their wallets.
Brute Force and Scam Tracking
In instances where users forget their password and lack seed word backups, Chris stated that many of these wallets can still be recovered using software that brute forces the password.
Even when users have a seed word backup, errors can occur when copying it down. Chris claimed that he could often recover these wallets as well by brute-forcing the missing word or the correct order of words.
Charles Brooks shared an instance where he assisted a “Casascius coin” collector in recovering his lost wallet key. A Casascius coin is a physical coin that carries a Bitcoin private key. Despite the collector accidentally damaging part of the coin’s film, Charles was able to use software to guess the missing characters to the private key.
The duo also offers a scam tracking service for users who fall victim to crypto scams. In such cases, they follow the transaction hashes of the victim sending funds to the scammer, and attempt to associate it with a known entity, often an exchange. They then compile a report and assist the client in reporting the case to law enforcement.
However, Charles warned that recovery of scammed funds is usually unlikely. The only hope is through police and court involvement. Despite this, some crypto users may benefit from being able to trace stolen funds and provide a report to the police.
The team reported a success rate of around 45% or 46% for password cracking assistance, contributing to their claim of recovering $6 million in lost crypto. They highlighted the significant issue of crypto users losing billions of dollars from forgotten passwords and lost seed words. According to Chananalysis, over 20% of the Bitcoin supply is in wallets that are no longer under the control of any person.