I’ve written previosly asking for help rescuing my sister’s lost Bitcoin. She had a 239 character long key, but had forgotten the exact password to her wallet. Thanks to @Josh, I found this company:
They were able to brute-force the password using my hints. Their commission was 20 %, but I got the coins back, and I think the service was very good.
Wow - that’s pretty impressive - and scary at the same time. Glad she got her funds back.
It is sort of scary, but I had a pretty good idea about what the password might be. After I contacted the service, I got the coins the next day. I used a Protonmail address for communication and stayed anonymous. The replies were only signed “Dave Bitcoin”, so the service stayed pretty anonymous too.
He’s been around quite awhile I believe
Where? Can you tell us more about him?
I’m surprise that guy with $200M locked in an encrypted drive didn’t try something similar.
I don’t think it’s that simple. Like I said, I had a pretty good idea about what the password was. It was not random.
From the news articles the guy seemed to be in the same boat. Surely it’d be worth a go.
“That guy” has only 10 guessing attempts (and I believe he’s already used about 8 of them) before the drive locks down and reformats itself as oppose to having infinite number of tries with some clues in regards what the characters in the passwords are.
https://www.kingston.com/unitedkingdom/us/usb-flash-drives/ironkey-d300-encrypted-usb-flash-drive
I was assuming that could have been virtualised in some way… the guy could put up a hell of a bounty!
Yes, I suspect a bit of sensationalism in that story.
As an FYI, for someone somewhat technically savvy, this isn’t too hard to do by yourself. Just run Kali Linux in a VM or as a LiveDVD and look up some tutorials on using the tools available on there to brute force passwords. This is undoubtedly what they are doing and taking a high percentage of your coins for very little effort on their part.
