Father-Son Team Helps People Brute-Force Their Lost Bitcoin Wallets

Hundreds of people have lost access to their cryptocurrency, and recovering those lost Bitcoins has become a lucrative business. "Motherboard talks to some of the people trying to get back their crypto, and the people who are making that happen in the newest episode of CRYPTOLAND on YouTube," writes Slashdot reader em1ly. Here's an excerpt from an article accompanying the episode: It's hard to know exactly how much Bitcoin is locked forever in wallets whose owners forgot the password, or in hard drives thrown out. There's plenty of anecdotes of desperate people trying to recover their lost Bitcoin. Chainalysis, a firm that tracks cryptocurrencies to help companies and law enforcement, estimated in 2018 that up to 23% of all Bitcoin is lost forever -- around 3.79 million bitcoins or the equivalent of around $170 billion at today's conversion rate. Naturally, some of the people who own those lost Bitcoin are willing to do anything to get them back. And there's a market for companies or individuals who promise to recover the lost Bitcoin for a fee. There's the mysterious Wallet Recovery Service, run by an anonymous person who goes by DaveBitcoin, or Crypto Asset Recovery, a father and son startup based in New Hampshire. In essence, what these organizations do is try as many password or passphrase combinations as fast as they can -- or as fast as their password cracking software and hardware will allow -- until they get the right one for a specific wallet they're trying to break into. They brute force the password, but they need help from their customers -- some guess, at least, of what their password may have been. Charlie Brooks, the son in the duo that runs Crypto Asset Recovery, told Motherboard that their success rate is 32 percent, without counting those customers that they believe have almost no chance of getting their Bitcoin back (who they decline to take on as clients).

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