It is surprising to discover how careless people are with their money. Thanks to this, a father and son who are fond of finding treasures on the Internet have set up their own company.
A few weeks ago it was published a poll between cryptocurrency owners, and 40% acknowledged that at some point they had forgotten or lost their password.
It is estimated that there are between 68,000 and 93,000 bitcoins lost, and a percentage of them could be recovered, for a value that is around 3,200 million euros, as Carla Mozee explains in Business Insider.
Many of these lost bitcoins they come from the first mined cryptocurrencies. Many people mined bitcoins when it was easy and cheap, out of curiosity, and for years they forgot about them. When going up in price they have realized that they do not remember the password, because they took it as a game and they didn’t target it.
In other cases, it is tragic losses. Like a San Francisco programmer who kept 7,002 bitcoins on a laptop, but forgot the password and, after trying 8 different ones, the security system only lets you try 2 more. Today those 7,002 bitcoins cost 258 million euros.
The tragic death of a CEO who kept $ 126 million from the company in cryptocurrencies was also widely commented, but did not reveal the password to anyone.
Cryptocurrencies are like cash: they have no owner, the owner is the one who owns them. It is stored in digital wallets, which are nothing more than encrypted numbers, which can only be accessed with a password.
If you lose or forget it, encryption systems are virtually impossible to break by brute force or by hacking.
The company Crypto Asset Recovery founded by father and son Charlie and Chris Brooks, is dedicated to recover lost bitcoins.
When a client arrives, the first thing they do is sign a contract stating that any bitcoin recovered belongs to its owner. Come on, they don’t intend to keep anything.
They do not charge a fixed price. They start from a base fee, and 20% of the bitcoins recovered.
As we have said, hacking an encrypted wallet is almost impossible, that’s why they use another method: get into the mind of the person who has lost or forgotten the password.
Fortunately, in many cases, passwords are not chosen at random: they are associated with people, places or words that are important to the client, and there are psychological methods to try to remember them.
You are questioned with the aim of remember that key idea that will come up with the password. If it is random and you do not remember where you saved it, private detectives and police methods are used to go back in time, rebuild what he did before he lost her, and reveal where he might be.
Your most successful case it only took them 5 seconds. By questioning the client, they created a list of 9 potential passwords, and one was the correct one.
In other cases, after several months of work and raw testing millions of passwords, they have had to give up.
They also have some dramatic cases, such as that of a person from a poor country where there are no bank accounts. He had $ 200 worth of bitcoins and it was his life savings.
The moral is simple: if you own cryptocurrencies … Save the password in a safe and traceable place!