When individuals in the crypto community lose their private keys or fall victim to scams, they often believe that their funds are lost forever. However, a father and son team from New Hampshire is offering hope. Chris and Charles Brooks, founders of Crypto Asset Recovery, have claimed to recover more than $6 million worth of lost crypto throughout their careers.
Crypto Asset Recovery provides a service to help users recover lost wallets and also offers scam-tracking for victims of crypto theft. In a recent interview with Cointelegraph, Chris Brooks revealed that around 70% of their clients seek their assistance after losing their Bitcoin wallet password. Many of these users do not have seed word backups, making it difficult to recover their wallets without professional help.
For older wallets that do not support the BIP39 recovery seed, the process becomes even more challenging. Chris explained that even for newer wallets, there are still some that require users to search for their seed words in order to create a backup. However, he claimed that most of these wallets can still be recovered using software that employs a brute-force method to guess the password.
Even if a user has a seed word backup, mistakes can still happen during the copying process. Missing words or errors when entering the words can lead to difficulties in accessing the wallet. Chris stated that he can often recover these wallets as well by attempting to brute-force the missing word or determine the correct order of the words.
Charles Brooks shared a recent success story where he helped a collector of “Casascius coins” recover a lost wallet key. Casascius coins are physical coins that contain a Bitcoin private key within a film on the backside. The private key is shorter than usual, consisting of only 26 to 36 characters. The collector had accidentally damaged the film, making “5 or 6 characters” illegible. However, Charles was able to use the remaining characters and the Bitcoin address snippet from the front of the coin to guess the missing characters of the private key using software.
In addition to wallet recovery, the Brooks duo has launched a scam tracking service to assist users who have fallen victim to con artists. When a client is scammed, they track the transaction hashes to trace the funds into the scammer’s wallet. From there, they try to identify the scammer’s address or “address cluster” and associate it with a known entity, often an exchange. They compile a report and help the client report the case to law enforcement.
While forgotten passwords can sometimes be recovered, Charles warned that funds lost to scams are usually gone forever. The only hope of recovering them is through involving the police and the courts. However, providing a report to law enforcement can still be beneficial for crypto users, as it may aid in ongoing investigations.
The Brooks duo claims to have recovered $6 million in lost crypto due to forgotten passwords, missing seed words, and other issues. They have achieved a success rate of around 45% to 46% when it comes to helping users with cracked passwords. This has earned them a reputation for being successful in recovering lost wallets.
The issue of lost passwords and seed words has resulted in billions of dollars worth of crypto being inaccessible. According to Chananalysis, over 20% of the Bitcoin supply is in wallets that are no longer controlled by anyone.