Crypto recovery specialists reveal how lost wallets, passwords and seed phrases can sometimes be recovered — but that’s of no help if the money was never there in the first place.
When a client named Rusty contacted crypto recovery specialist Chris Brooks in 2021, he said he and two others had won 5,000 Bitcoin in a court case, worth around $53 million at the time.
They immediately set up a Zoom call to discuss the case.
“There were three guys on the call, and one of them holds up a phone. It has like $53 million in a Bitcoin address,” says Brooks, founder and chief executive of CryptoAssetRecovery.com.
The men claimed they were able to withdraw as much as $300,000 a week but wanted to get the whole fortune out. If Brooks and his son, Charlie, flew to Georgia to help them crack the wallet, they would make them millionaires.
Brooks and son bought plane tickets and went the next day.
At lunch, Rusty, a 6-foot-3 Army veteran, revealed the wallet didn’t only contain 5000 BTC.
The men then drove about an hour to a strip mall owned by one of them, where they went into the back office and were handed notebooks containing dozens of recovery seeds. The pair spent the day opening wallets.
Brooks never established whether the wallets they were given had previously held the BTC or ETH Rusty claimed to own. They were never reimbursed for the flight tickets either.
Related: Do the Coldcard attacks mean all hardware wallets are now insecure?
Brooks now suspects Rusty had fallen victim to scammers who convinced him he had a large crypto fortune when he didn’t.
It was an early lesson for their crypto recovery business.
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