A wallet.dat file from a dead hard drive. A keystore was lost after it was erased when tidying up files. Coins were purchased back in 2013, and the laptop has been sitting in the attic ever since. There are many cryptocurrency recovery services making magical promises to recover your lost cryptocurrencies, but this area of recovery is real, valuable work, which is why our own UK-based laboratory will only provide proper recoverable solutions and name those that are not possible for free. This is important as we believe that when it comes to money, honesty is the service.
Wallet jobs can be successful as long as the crypto-material is available physically in some form: wallet files on a failed drive (the wallet.dat, the keystore JSON files, and the application data folder of the wallet application) can all be found via typical hard drive recovery using a search for wallet signature patterns; recovering deleted wallet files by file carving (i.e., recognising the structure of the wallet) before they are overwritten (as would occur with any deleted file); old computers and/or old storage devices may contain older versions of the wallets you used, from before the coins mattered; and corrupt wallet files can often be repaired enough so that their keys can be extracted. Passphrase-protected finds stay protected (the file returns, and your passphrase opens it), and hardware wallets are their own conversation, since seed phrases, not devices, are usually the real question.
No seed phrase; no private key; no wallet file exists anywhere, and therefore no recovery from us or from anyone else. The same mathematics that make the coins yours make them entirely unrecoverable without those keys. Equally so a lost strong passphrase to an intact wallet (brute force of today’s KDFs is showmanship, sold per hour) and drives whose relevant sectors have been genuinely overwritten. We say this on the page because desperate people are prey to this field: any “recovery service” asking for payment prior to honestly determining whether you even have a chance for your key material to exist should be treated as the risk it is. Our diagnostic will determine whether your key material can exist first, for free; then the fixed quote will cover only work with a real chance.
Yes, many times, genuinely. For pre-2016 systems that still have their original hard drives in working condition, this is an area where we most often find lost funds. When looking through all available methods to find missing funds in a system, our approach will be systematic, based on wallet signatures, rather than speculative. Send us the drive (taken out of the computer) and include the names of every wallet software you can remember using, and then we’ll look at the diagnostic report to see what we may find before giving you a quote for recovering those funds.
The technology is essentially the same as a standard clicking drive: image first, gently, weak spots later, but the searching in those images is optimised for wallets. Given the value, we believe you will need to adjust how urgent you are on retrying and stop trying to power it. Our pricing stays bench-priced; we don’t charge percentages of what’s inside.
Realistically, no. Wallet encryption today is designed to prevent brute force attacks. Anyone who is offering you an unlimited number of attempts is selling hope per hour. If you’ve got a limited list of potential passphrases that could be used, then we can discuss some directed testing. A real blank is a real blank, and we will tell you so for free.