Wallet Recovery Experts Crack $1B Crypto Wallet… But Find Just $10
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By
- Christina Comben, staff writer
- Reviewed by Andrew Fenton, staff editor
Published
- Sep 3, 2026
Crypto recovery specialists crack $1B crypto wallet… but find just $10
Magazines tell tales of lost wallets, passwords, and seed phrases, but sometimes, the money isn’t there. When a client named Rusty contacted crypto recovery specialist Chris Brooks in 2021, he claimed to have won 5,000 Bitcoin in a court case, worth around $53 million at the time.
During a Zoom call, Rusty and two others showed Brooks a phone with a Bitcoin address containing $53 million. They wanted to withdraw the funds, but Brooks and his son, Charlie, were skeptical. They flew to Georgia to help, but the story took an unexpected turn.
At lunch, Rusty revealed a billion dollars in ETH in another wallet. Brooks suspected a scam: "Something very odd is going on here." They found about $10 in Bitcoin in the wallets they were given, but never recovered the flight tickets they bought.
Lost Crypto: When Wallets and Passwords Fail
For wallet recovery specialists, "lost crypto" doesn’t always mean the blockchain-based loss of funds. It often involves recovering the information needed to access a wallet. While someone might have thrown away a hardware wallet, forgotten a password, or lost part of their seed phrase, it doesn’t necessarily mean the crypto is gone.
Bruno Krauss, co-founder and CTO of ReWallet, explains:
"If you have some missing words, then you can often recover them."
Bitcoin’s BIP39 seed phrase standard uses a list of 2,048 words, making recovery possible if most words are known. The more pieces missing, the harder the puzzle.
Password recovery can also be achieved through reverse-engineering flawed password generators or understanding a client’s personal password preferences.