Hackers Helped Me Find My Lost Bitcoin Fortune

Rhonda Kampert was an early adopter.

She bought six Bitcoins in 2013; they were worth around $80 (£60) each and were the mouthpiece of the fringes of the internet.

“I’d hear a radio talk show and they started talking about cryptocurrency and Bitcoin, and that caught my attention,” she recalls. “Buying it had been so complicated before, but I messed around and got my coins.”

Rhonda lives in the state of Illinois. We spent some of her digital money over the following year, just before she forgot. But when she saw headlines in late 2017 indicating that the value of Bitcoin had risen to around $20,000, she was ecstatic and ran straight to the computer to test it and pay.

‘It was awful.’

However, there was a catch. Part of the credentials for her Bitcoin wallet — a computer application or gadget that stores a collection of secret numbers referred to as private keys — was missing.

“I then realized that my printout had left several digits at the top of my wallet identification, and that I had a piece of paper with my password, but no idea what my wallet ID was,” Rhonda explains. “It was terrible; I tried everything for months, but it had been useless, so I gave up.”

By April of last year, the value of Bitcoin had risen to over $50,000, quite 600 times what Rhonda had spent eight years before. She went online, rejuvenated in her quest to retrieve her coins, and found crypto treasure hunters Chris and Charlie Brooks, a father and son team.

“After chatting with the guys online for a while, I felt comfortable enough to present all the data I could remember. Then I sat and waited, she explains.

“We finally got a video call together and watched it all unfold. It was there when Chris opened the wallet. Also, I couldn’t believe how relieved I was!” Rhonda’s three and a half Bitcoin wallet was worth $175,000 at the time.

“After giving Chris and Charlie their 20%, the most important thing I did was withdraw $10,000 in coins to help my daughter Megan get into college.”

She says she wants to keep the rest in a hardware wallet, which could be a security device like a USB stick that keeps her information offline. The login pin for her new hardware wallet is permanently seared into her mind. Rhonda hopes the coins, currently valued at $43,000 each, will appreciate.

She refers to them as her “retirement fund” for when she decides to step away from her profession as a stock and cryptocurrency day trader.

Lost billions

However, there are many Rhondas out there who need help. According to crypto experts Chainalysis, the maximum amount of 3.7 million Bitcoins is lost by owners of the 18.9 million in circulation.

And within the decentralized realm of cryptocurrency, no one is in charge. Therefore, there are not many options if you forget your wallet login information. According to Chris and Charlie, companies like theirs, which use computers to work out many thousands of possible login ID and password combinations, can recover 2.5 percent of the missing Bitcoin, or $3.9 billion.

Chris established his company, Itechwares, in 2017, but took an opening to explore other projects. After an interview with his son Charlie a little over a year ago, he revived it. “I was on a sabbatical from college and had traveled a bit, but I used to be a receptionist with my dad working on company ideas,” recalls Charlie, now 20.

We came up with the idea of ​​restarting the business, so we brought servers in-house and restarted everything over the next few weeks.”

When the value of Bitcoin peaked in November 2021, the father and son began receiving over 100 emails and phone calls a day from potential customers from their workshop in their family area on the New Hampshire coast.

They are working through the backlog of cases now that the temperature has dropped a bit. Charlie has no intention of getting his applied science degree because the firm is doing so well. On the other hand, the two joke that they are always disappointed.

They believe they are only successful about 30% of the time, starting with clients’ hazy memories or disorganized documents, which indicate potential login details. Yet people are often disappointed by what they discover.

“For the most part, we don’t want to tell what’s in the wallet,” explains Charlie, “so we have to trust the customer that it’s an amount that’s worth the effort we’re putting in.” “During the summer we had a situation where the suspect claimed to have 12 Bitcoin.

We were very professional with him, but behind the computer screen we were high on each other and giddy with anticipation of a possible payday. “We spent probably 60 hours on the PC server and about 10 hours with the client putting together all the hints he could give.

“Then we opened it on the video conference – and it was empty.” Only one client, along with Chris and Charlie, ever miscalculated the contents of his wallet. It was their most outstanding move ever, with $280,000 in Bitcoin.

They claim to have recovered “seven figures” worth of Bitcoins over the past year.

Hardware hacking

The father-and-son duo is part of a growing industry of ethical hackers who use their skills to help people recover cryptocurrency that has been misplaced. Another is Joe Grand, who started hacking as a teenager and is known in the hacker network for testifying before the US Senate in 1998 under the name Kingpin about early Internet vulnerabilities.

He recently became famous on YouTube after demonstrating how he punched through a hardware wallet containing $2 million in Theta cryptocurrency in his studio in Portland; Oregon Joe developed a way n, after months of preparation and practice, hacking on various hardware wallets.

He eventually succeeded by combining two previously disclosed vulnerabilities with the hardware wallet in question, demonstrating that it can “slip” and reveal the PIN when attacked with precisely timed electrical shocks.

“No matter how many times you crack a crypto wallet or other security,” he claims, “it feels like magic.”

“Although I had demonstrated in my experiments that I could hack this wallet several times. I was nervous on the day as you never know what is going to happen and we only had one shot; otherwise the whole device might break and the money will be lost forever.”

“Opening the wallet gave me a huge jolt of excitement. I guess it’s a technical variant of treasure hunting.”

Joe’s day job is educating manufacturers on how to protect their products from hackers, but with his first client, Dan Reich, he’s started a wallet-unlocking side business. “We’ll try,” he continues, “if there are wallets big enough and valuables big enough to devote my time to.”

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