“Bitcoin Hunter”: Hackers in Search of Billions of Lost Cryptocurrencies

Rhonda Kampert was one of the pioneers.

He bought six bitcoins in 2013, when they cost around $80 each and were the talk of a niche internet site.

“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, buying them was very complicated, but I made my way and managed to get hold of some coins.”

Rhonda, from Illinois in the American Midwest, spent some of her digital money over the next year and then forgot about it.

He didn’t remember until the end of 2017, when he read those headlines announcing that the value of bitcoin had reached $13,000. She excitedly ran to her computer to log in and withdraw the money.

But there was a problem: you were missing some data to access your digital walleta program or device that stores a series of secret numbers or private keys.

“I noticed that on the printout, my wallet ID was missing a few digits. I had a piece of paper with my password on it, 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

By the spring of 2021, the value of bitcoin had surpassed $50,000, more than 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 hunter”, two digital treasure hunters: Chris and Charlie Brooksfather and son.

“After talking on-line for a while, I trusted them enough to give them every detail I could remember. And I kept waiting, ”she states.

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 in there were worth $175,000 at the time..

“After giving Chris and Charlie their 20%, the first thing I did was withdraw $10,000 to help my daughter Megan with college.”

Have the rest stored in a hardware walleta physical security device, similar to a USB stick, that stores your keys offline.

Today each of his digital coins is worth $43,000 and he expects them to rise in value. It’s your retirement fund for when you decide to retire from trading cryptocurrencies and stocks, he says.

billions lost

But there are many who, like Rhonda, need help. An estimate from expert cryptocurrency analytics firm Chainalysis suggests that of the 18.9 million bitcoins in circulation, the owners have lost up to 3.7 millionAnd 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 testing hundreds of thousands of possible login ID and password combinations, they could recover 2.5% of lost bitcoins, worth about $3.9 billion. Chris started his business, Crypto Asset Recovery, in 2017, but he 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 up and running again. business,” says 20-year-old Charlie.

They set up office in their seaside home in New Hampshire, and after bitcoin peaked in November 2021, father and son began receiving more than 100 emails and calls a day from potential customers.

Now the pace has slowed down, but they work on the cases that had accumulated.

The business is doing 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.

And it is that, due to the bad memory of their clients or their confusing paperwork, the clues lead them to solve only 30% of cases.

Even then, they are often disappointed by what they find.

“Most of the time we can’t know what’s in the wallet, so we have to trust the customer that there will be an amount in there that’s worth the work,” says Charlie.

“In the summer a person told us that he had 12 bitcoins in his wallet. We were very professional with him, obviously, but behind the screen we would shake hands, excited about what we would receive on payment day, ”she recalls.

“We spent 60 hours on the server, plus about 10 on the client, gathering clues. But when we opened the wallet during the video call, it was empty.”

Chris and Charlie say that only one of their clients underestimated what was inside his wallet. It was his biggest loot so far: $280,000 in bitcoin.

In the last year they say that have recovered bitcoins worth a total of “seven digits”.

hardware hacking

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 is too. He started hacking as a teenager and is well known in the hacking community. hackers for testifying before the United States Senate in 1998 about the first internet vulnerabilities under his username, Kingpin.

He recently made a viral video on YouTube about how he opened a hardware wallet which contained $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.

He ultimately 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, really when you break any security device, it feels like magic. It doesn’t matter how many times you’ve done it,” she 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 we only had one chance; if it went wrong the coins would be lost forever”.

“Opening the wallet was a huge adrenaline rush. I suppose that it’s like a technical version of a treasure 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 recover lost crypto.”If there are wallets big enough and treasure big enough to spend my time,” he says, “then let’s try it.”