Bitcoin Forum

Stolen funds have been tracked to an Electrum wallet, can anyone advise as to ANY possible options to return those funds, and or seize the wallet.

Thank you

If they're in an electrum wallet and you don't have any private keys, no. But how do you know they're in one, how did you track them? Electrum wallets don't look special afaik compared with the other wallets so I'm not sure how you'd have been able to track that - unless they dumped a public key somewhere or something...

1. Electrum wallet is a noncustodial wallet, meaning even the people who created the wallet cannot  access or "freeze" any Bitcoins sent in an address generated using the wallet software.

2. How do you know that the funds were sent in an electrum wallet?  ::)
Because it's impossible to know by just tracking the funds. Electrum is not an exchange.

The funds are never "in a wallet". The funds are, to say it simple, always on the blockchain. The wallet software only helps handling those funds if one has - in a way or another - the private key stored in the wallet.

This being said, a non-custodial wallet like Electrum works in a way that the owner has the private keys, as opposed to custodial wallets where the custodian is the actual owner (according to the network) and one only has an account there from where he is usually allowed to withdraw. In this case the authorities can get in touch with the custodian. Now, since Electrum is non-custodial, you simply don't know who has the private key. Even more, that somebody can use Electrum today and recover his wallet in Sparrow, Blue Wallet or even Bitcoin Core tomorrow if he wants to do that.

So the Electrum "part" doesn't help you that much (if it's actually correct). It just helps you know it was a non-custodial wallet. But you cannot seize anything, it's just a free software with its source code free to download. It's just a tool.

If you want to get to the point of seizing anything, you have to keep an eye on those funds and see if they touch a KYC exchange. Then you can have a case and then the authorities should contact the exchange ASAP.

@OP
Give or at least educate us how did you ever prove that the funds that were stolen ended into an electrum wallet? Whether you determine what wallet the culprit has been using after stealing those funds, it won't help you unless the hackers voluntarily send them back.

Have the same question on mind on how he do able to determine that its an electrum wallet and not other those common wallets that we do have in the market but in overall which asking out if those funds would be retreived then 0% chance it would happen and hackers do tend to give it back?
Dont stress out yourself on believing with fairytales.  :D

Sorry for  your loss op and its better to move on and take this as a lesson learned that wallet security should be given out that outmost consideration
when it comes to security aspect.

How did you know that it's sitting on an Electrum wallet though?

But sorry to burst the bubble for you, there is no possible options to get those funds back. You need to have control of that wallet, meaning you either have the mnemonic phrase or the private key.

And those two are hard to option. Hopefully though, this will serve you a lesson to really take care of your bitcoin.

You didn't tell us how it was stolen?! Was your exchange account stolen and the money moved to your Electrium wallet, or was the money stolen from your wallet by grabbing the private key? In both cases you can do nothing if you do not have the private key of the wallet to which the money was transferred, it is impossible to access the wallet unless you get the private key or the seed, even if you report it to the police you will not be able to prove that the money was transferred to the other wallet illegally.

If the developers of the wallet themselves can't help you then there is no legal way to seize that wallet except for the police to physically access that wallet or seed.
In general, knowing the software used to create addresses will not help you much (although I do not know how you knew it) and therefore you must know the IP address associated with those addresses and then try to find the person.

OP seems not to have enough experience knowledge. All the above advises are great helpful until op gives more details about how the funds have been stolen from electrum. It happened sometimes that the error is from network synchronisation not to show the actual balance.
If op is sure about being his wallet compromised, then better to focus on how the hack happened and forget about the money.

But why this topic is posted here in "Legal" section ?

Probably because of the word seize involved. Anyway already members asked that how can OP say that the funds are in electrum which is impossible to prove unless you accessed the wallet and found which is stored in the electrum even we can't prove the wallet when we have private keys because we can import and export our funds to different wallets with the help of private keys in a matter of minutes.