Bitcoin Forum

is it worth buying lost wallet.dat files? did anyone succeed moving funds from them?

Do you have a way to check if the wallet file is legit though? If people can temper with the file (which I imagine they can) then there's no point in doing that.

No. They are a scam.

It is absolutely trivial for someone to create a fake wallet.dat file which appears to contains the keys to any address with any amount of bitcoin, which they then sell for a profit. Anyone who buys such a file will never be able to access the coins, because the private keys for them do not exist within that wallet file.

If someone really did have a real wallet which they had forgotten the password to, then they could use something like this (https://btcrecover.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Extract_Scripts/) to allow people to trustlessly try to crack the password in return for some portion of the coins. There is no need for them to sell their wallet file.

Most of the sold wallet.dat files out there are most likely fake and never heard someone success to brute-force these wallets. So if you buy them you are just wasting your money and time trying to find the right password.

There is a discussion about this fake wallet.dat here "Fake walle.dat can trick bitcoin core client? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5130929.0)"

Would someone consider selling their money for a much lower value than that money? Even if the purpose is money laundering (which is an illegal activity), the methods used are a little sophisticated.

Therefore, everyone who tries to say that you can buy wallets and then sell them to achieve a good return is trying to sell you something that is mostly fraud or illegal, and in the end you may not only lose your money, but also get yourself into legal problems that end up in prison.

Chances of succeeding is at odds of 0.01%, and if you do the calculations this is one big scam that probably will involve the seller showing you one old wallet address that has lots of coins and once this leaves you excited you will be willing to pay  for something you want to gamble on to get brute force access too, but we all know this kind of wallets are a dead end and we should leave it at that. Let greed not lead us into a position of getting scammed , let's out smart these scammers.

Simple answer: No! I can only agree with everyone in this thread. It's just not worth buying such wallets. Mostly they are fake wallets and there are no bitcoins on them. If you do get a wallet that actually has keys for bitcoins, they usually have a very strong password. Cracking these passwords is almost impossible and would require a lot of hardware power and regardless take many years. Therefore, no one reports in this thread who has successfully received bitcoins from purchased wallet.dat files.  ;)

The sellers of these wallet.dat are good at convincing people that it's worth buying them and there's Bitcoin on it until you are late to find out that there's no Bitcoin on it because logic will tell us that if there is Bitcoin inside it, they will not sell it, it's like a mystery box being sold in the market they will tell you that there are items inside that's worth ten times of what you're paying, sometimes you hit a jackpot but most of the time you end up not getting what you bargain, so let logic prevail in you, they will not sell it if there's Bitcoin there, like what they are claiming.

I think it's a waste of time, you don't know if you will succeed in finding the password and also you don't know if the bitcoin in the wallet is worth the effort or not.

Also, you should pay attention as far as I know wallet.dat files can be for Bitcoin, Litecoin or Dogecoin wallets.

In any case, if you are interested and want to try, you can try this site(try at your own risk). They sell these files, and they claim that they are real and not scam. You can pay by bitcoin:
https://wallet-dat.net/

I believe that the method of scam that these scammers used is creating a wallet file that is not fake and shows real transactions, but the private key data is manipulated. They add random data to make the discovery process difficult, and then you will not be able to know if the file is real or not except with the private key, but outwardly and it looks like it Sell a wallet file to someone with enough hardware to crack the encrypted password.

you can read the details about it here Fake walle.dat can trick bitcoin core client? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5130929.msg50566174#msg50566174)

While it is possible to recover lost Bitcoin wallets using the wallet.dat file, it's not a guaranteed solution. You might be able to find someone willing to sell you a wallet.dat file, but there's no way to know if it's legitimate or if the funds are still there.

Once the funds are sent from a wallet, there's no way to retrieve them unless the receiving party decides to return them. So, buying a lost wallet.dat file is not a guarantee of recovering your funds.

I think, better to focus on securing your own wallets and keeping your private keys safe.

I haven't bought any lost wallet.dat files nor have any plans to do so. However, I know that there is no way you can get funds from those wallets. Whoever is selling these wallet files, are just scamming people.
For common sense, think that why would anyone sell these wallet files if people could retrieve the money from them themselves? Why not they get that money in those wallets  ???
The answer is simply that they can't extract the money but they want to make money from us by fooling us.
Just stay away from these so called getting quick rich methods, you will only end up losing your funds.