Bitcoin Forum

I came across the post on Reddit about a guy that took this hard drive that he stored his bitcoin to a data recovery specialist to fix it, who told him that his 276 bitcoin has been stolen, wait a minute how, his hard drive was bad and gave it to you to fix it and then you told him it was stolen.
It's a shame how people would still act so unwise with their holdings, I know its not his fault that his hard drive got bad but at least he should have taken some measures to secure his holdings, and now there is no proff that the so called data recovery specialist was the one who stole it or not.

Lesson learnt: always be smart about your holdings, cyrpto currency by nature is so easy to steal if someone has access to the right things, it's just like giving a brief case containing your documents to your properties or maybe a million dollar to someone to open it for you and when he does what happens, do you expect him to be honest about it, although for now we are unsure it was stolen by the specialist but all arrows lead to him.

I think people should get more educated about bitcoin even before teaching them to accumulate it cause if they are not careful they end up losing it and think about losing 8 years with of accumulated bitcoin just for a ignorant decision like this.

Here Is a link to the post on Reddit.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1as7agq/bitcoin_core/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share

Am sure he is just one of the victim of those that advertise their services on recovering service for a lost wallet recovery seeds, keys, or even the coins if lost, if am to ask him, what i will do first is to ask about how he met the person that repair his hard drive, so far as am concern, i don't think there's any guarantee means of fixing a hard drive once its damage except on a minor case, how also did the maintenance guy know about the content on his hard drive, maybe he needs to sue him if he really wanted him to confess.

This just another story of a victim of circumstances, the 50yrs old and above man was lucky to have accumulated such an amount of Bitcoin but the truth is "mistakes are inevitable" he was just unlucky to have lost his assets just with a little mistakes which he was ignorant of.

taking a closer look at the event there are some very few reasons to doubt the story if the coin being mined as at 2012 based on what someone unveiled in the comments[1] which is based on the tx time stamp and fees.

If he had been keeping up with the assets since cumulation he would have gotten alot of knowledge to change his wallet long ago. because maybe the wallet he used was one of the weak wallets but at that time it was strong, better wallets had evolve since then but because he lacks knowledge of them or had not been in touch with his accumulation had lead to lost of funds. even if one wants a long term investment he or she should at least be around information concerning his asset the age is never an excuse to me because there are some forum members who are even other but yet they manage and maintain their bitcoins.

One major lesson that must be learned from this story is "do not store your keys (private keys/seed phrase) online" [Not your keys, not your coin]. although there are some measures that is now in existence like encryption etc yet offline is still the very best. not just storing your keys online but even in the USB disks just like this event that it got corrupted so a USB disk can also be corrupted.

Additionally, this is a more reason for hardware wallet recommendation, a good cold storage wallet and wallet maintenance because it's not just only about buying it's also include holding so wallet security (storage) should also be paramount.

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[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1as7agq/comment/kqolk5i/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

This is like saying your house by nature is easy to break into if you give someone the keys. That is not the nature of Bitcoin, it just means if you give up what signifies access to something, you've handed over that access to someone else.

By no means a complete list of faults and bad practice done here by the owner who lost ~276BTC.

• No redundant copies on other storage media of the wallet (relying on (cheap?) single flash thumbdrive media, seriously!?)
• No strong password protection of the wallet or it completely missing (maybe password was also stored on the thumbdrive which is stupid)
• Doing nothing to ensure a safer storage e.g. by end of 2017 when Bitcoin's value had a significant five-digit ATH. In March 2012 those ~276BTC were worth about 1240$. At time of stealing it were roughly 7 million $$. Today it's more than 14.3 millions. Moving coins to a decent hardware wallet with redundant storage of mnemonic recovery words could've prevented such a desaster (the data recovery guy clearly lied to the thumbdrive owner about the fate of the wallet's coins).

I'll stop here, that's already bad and reckless enough.

I don't believe this story because it raises too many questions.
-why did that person hold so much money on a single drive?
-why was there no password protection or a very weak one, so that the "specialist" was able to to gain access?
How do I know he gained access? He knew the money was transferred out of that wallet. Without a password he wouldn't be able to even see the addresses, so the wallet most likely wasn't protected or had a very weak password like 1234 or something like that.
-why was there no backup? I used a core wallet in 2014 and I had multiple wallet.dat files backed in other places and all wallets were password protected.
-why did he give that drive to someone? With that kind of money you can literally make them drive to your house, or you drive to their company and watch the process. If you offer 1 bitcoin to someone to recover the wallet, they'll fly to your home with all their gear.

I don't understand how you can lose such amount to be honest, you should always safeguard your HD seed in the safe place. And if your bag isn't stored into an HD wallet with a known seed, you should transmit your funds ASAP into this kind of wallet in order to protect them. With an HD seed you need to keep and to use any digital files, you can safely write it down on a paper.

Well am suprised even to hear the possibility of someone having such amount of Bitcoin and still being so naive and clumsy to fall for such stories although no one can be certain on the story about the Bitcoin actually being stolen but I think the guy should have done his own research and kept his holdings more flexible because I know for sure if am having such coins, I would rather prefer saving it in an offline cold wallet where nothing like hack stories would be told because that's the last thing I will hate to hear about Bitcoin that I have saved up for a long time.

I'm just as surprised as you are.. but we've got some dull set of Internet freaks that would not pay attention to details, no matter how big the instructions must have been inscripted on them magazines and journals...

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it doesn't harm much to believe this must have happened ( cus it's quite unbelievable), but the dude must be pretty witless to have accepted to hand over his coins to an operator...

Sandra 🧑‍🦰

If what is actually contained in that hardware wallet is up to 276 bitcoin, then I see it as a big risk to have it sent to be fixed. To get a new hardware wallet, it would have just cost him not more than $200, and then he could just move out of his crypto asset to the new one he bought. If the old hardware got so bad that it could not be used by him, he would have bought a new one, set it up and collected the address, then go along with the address to the technician shops and wait for him to fix it up. Then he just immediately moved out of his asset, but it seems he was less concerned because of the trust he had in the technician. If anyone should be responsible for that theft, then I suspect the technician or it could just be a crooked up story. In real life, I don't think anyone would be willing to take such kind of risk.

To me this story immediately sounded suspicious, because 276 coins is not a small amount, it was already quite a sum in 2017, surely the person who supposedly mined them in 2012 would check on their coins during a bull run? And then during the 2021 bull run?

Perhaps OP is trying to use community effort to doxx that transactions. There's a saying that if you want to get the right answer on the Internet, you should post a wrong one yourself and wait to be corrected, maybe it's something like that.

He did bad at start.

Bad by having no back up for his wallets.

At the end, when his hard drive was broken technically, he has no other choices than bringing it to a third-party repairing, data recovery service, to retrieve data exclusively his wallet files.

He had no other choices than that if he can not recover data by himself.

However, another lesson is he should choose a trusted service, not a random, new one without long history of service operation. By the way, whatever service he chooses, he must afford to lose his bitcoin. No guarantee that any service will help him successfully recover data, wallet files or don't steal his bitcoins.

Back up. Back up. Test your back up. You will not fall into such nightmare.

So thats it? Maybe indeed its broken but isnt it a bit ironic to say its broken that eventually they only should fix the hard drive but they mentioned it was stolen how come they know that means they have been access to it? What a shit show if ever! Poor guy that they really probably stolen that.

TBH, I can't even think if this story is true or not. I mean it's Reddit. I can also share there that I'm an early adopter of Bitcoin, invested heavily in it, bought 100 BTC in the early 2010s, lost it, made a made-up story for it, and let people sympathize for me but in reality, it wasn't true at all.

The owner bought 276 Bitcoins yes. Didn't he think of ways how to at least keep it as secure as possible? It's only 2 things. It's either the owner is a complete idiot that he didn't secure his 276 Bitcoins, or this is just a made-up bullsh*t story. If this is true though, I feel jealous of that data recovery specialist because he got that amount of Bitcoins for "FREE". I mean what are the odds that something like that might happen to you?

I don't believe in that story. Buying that much amount of Bitcoins, and you don't even know how to secure it?

Yeah the story sounds so lame to me that someone would be so clumsy and worst of all super careless, just Like handing over  diamond vault to a cracker and not having any preventive measures to ensure he doesn't steal anything or maybe staying their to watch.

But here comes the funny part how did the specialist know that they was a bitcoin key phrase or something related in the hard drive, unless the funky guy must have blabbed all about it to him. Making the story even looking more made up. I don't know what to believe tho, but the purpose of the thread is to tell everyone that such stupid mistakes can still happen and we should all be extra careful about out holdings and make smart decisions.


I thought so too at first, but then i came across a Comment that says the bitcoin was really in the address he shared.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1as7agq/bitcoin_core/kqoo29n?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1as7agq/bitcoin_core/kqolk5i?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1as7agq/bitcoin_core/kqog26u?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1as7agq/bitcoin_core/kqof8za?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share&context=3

All these comments make the story seem true, but I could still be a gang up of liers who knows what they are up to

Edit. My mistake . I didn’t look at the amounts that came into his wallet

Everything is fine, but have you followed the movement of bitcoins? Funds were regularly received into the wallet, and it would no longer be possible to call this a one-time purchase. The withdrawal to another wallet was only in September 2023, and before that, annual injections may indicate that the so-called brother understood or knew what he was doing.

It's quite strange behavior, isn't it?

Edit. My mistake ;D. I didn’t look at the amounts that came into his wallet. But then the question arises: was someone watching this wallet?

What?
Who even leaves such an amount of Bitcoin on a software wallet? That's just preposterous.
Indeed, ignorance and mediocrity can cost someone a great deal. I believe he didn't know that the safest way to store Bitcoin was through the Hardware wallets because if he had chosen to store his holdings via a hardware wallet, there's no fucking way he would have been this unfortunate.

It is pertinent to have more than one backup of your wallet, if one of your flashdrives goes bad, you have another one to fall back to, you must also have your seed phrase on paper in addition to your flashdrive back up. Under no circumstance should your drive containing your Bitcoins ever get into the hands of a third party.
A person who can take their flashdrive containing a large amount of BTC to a data recovery person can obviously use a hardware wallet and still somehow lose their seed phrase stored on paper or mistakenly show it to someone else.

So the method used in storing someone’s holding doesn’t really matter much unless the person who is holding and making use of the wallet is careful enough.

One can still use the best wallet with the highest safety measure and still lose there money if they don’t take security seriously. Ignorant and what someone did not know is really a bad thing.

this would be human error. It's not the device, the wallet security, or the thief at fault. Such user errors can occur, even regarding selecting seeds stored on a particular device. When a device is damaged and requires recovery, the risk of losing assets becomes greater.
We must be wiser in managing our wallet seeds. many events can be our experience. Hopefully, that won't be the experience we experience ourselves. we have been warned, then we must be more careful.

So, he forgets about having 276 Bitcoins, even when all over the nest there were people talking about 69k for one, he finds the drive by accident, remembers what it was and doesn't realize it's  8 millions (at that time) and takes it to a complete stranger to get the millions out of it.
And then after he told him they were lost he waits another 5 months to tell their relatives.
Common! Btw the coins haven't move one bit after that so the thief just moved them and kept on his business not taking advantage of 14 million! Not to mention he paid roughly exactly what was need for the next block, I can't imagine a guy repairing thumb drives in some shop on probably just above minimum wage being that calculated.

So the reddit post is all about a guy who wanted his data to recovered by coming to a data recovery service am I right?. He shouldn't trust someone who he doesn't know to recover a data on his hard drive to get the wallet information because he is only getting scammed because of it where the data recovery guy told him that his bitcoin is stolen. By the way, you didn't mention anything about before the recovery if the address of the wallet did have that amount of bitcoin so, let's say that there is indeed a bitcoin in that wallet but if bitcoin is stolen after the recovery guy said that his bitcoin is stolen that means the recovery guy is the one who stole it. This guy should have downloaded a recovery tool online since it is available and then transfer recovery tool to the device that he will use the recovery tool and just to be safe then it shouldn't be connected to sn internet connection and when the wallet id found then he should use different device to import the wallet to transfer it in another bitcoin wallet.

The data recovery specialist is the first suspect I would also point my fingers at. Prior to taken the hard drive for him to repair, if I was very sure that my bitcoin holding was intact and it was just after he repaired it that I found it missing, he will be the first suspect for it. 276 bitcoins is a large amount of money that must have been accumulated through hard work, patient and pains, losing such amount can even cause one paralysis and also mental problem especially if your total wealth savings is all there and your present holdings won’t beat that amount again. I feel so bad for what has happened to him and I hope this will serve as a lesson to others that carelessly handle their holdings in which they have big amount of bitcoins saved in.


Getting acquainted with the right knowledge before holding bitcoin is the best thing for any investor in bitcoin should do. You will have accumulated and saved all your life and just by a little mistake, all of your hard earned money will go into the thin air. He is a victim of circumstance but still he should have been more careful. Seeing his age I won’t blame him much because a younger person would have thought about what if my bitcoin gets stolen, and would find a way to secure it proper before taken the hard drive to repair. No one can be trusted just like some people don’t even trust themselves. I hope he gets through this in the shortest possible time, indeed another big lesson learnt by him and others in the crypto space.

You are right then. Not your keys, not your coins. Bitcoin investors should not only focus on accumulating bitcoin but first and foremost, they should always ensure the security of their coins. If the guy in the story values much about privacy and not giving access to anyone relating to his bitcoins, then he should have hold them until now. But ignorance kills everything. Gone are the hard-earned bitcoins in just a single wrong decison.

This may serve a lesson not just for bitcoin investors but definitely for all those who are into different investments. If you can’t secure your investment 100%, then don’t bother investing in the first place.

Assuming that the story was real. A guy that has that can literally be a king of his own castle right now and don't have to work and when you have such amounts, are you really okay to let someone touch your PC where you've been holding your assets? your btc? I doubt it that we're even going to hand it over to a recovery specialists that way. He hasn't backed up and that's his problem when that tech guy or the recovery specialist has seen that opportunity to steal but then, is there a proof with that? What if the private keys have been handed over to another guy and culprit and it isn't the tech guy? There's not that enough proof when you just post addresses.

Since I am somewhat familiar with the way these data recovery services work, I can assume that the guy may have inadvertently disclosed that there are bitcoin private keys or wallet files on the damaged hard drive. Data recovery professionals routinely inquire about the specific data types users seek to recover from compromised media.  This information greatly aids the recovery process and improve success rates.

The truth is, people weren't so serious about Bitcoin when it was so cheap. They just bought it and left it as is. They forgot about their holdings; once Bitcoin reached a significant price, they recalled their holdings. They start finding out about their Bitcoin wallet data. A few people got their data perfectly, and a few lost their data. This is a mistake and the result of not being serious. So we have to learn the right way when we intend to invest in something. However, it would be traced if the recovery team stole the funds. The victim should know the address and check the transaction details. Hackers will definitely move the funds. 

I kind of think this too, that this story seems not Real, how someone would be this reckless with such an amount of Bitcoin 276, well, if at all this is true, then the victim didn't take security seriously before investing in Bitcoin, is not a matter of owing any amount of Bitcoin, one thing is owing Bitcoin and the other thing is about the security, and if we don't take the security of investment in Bitcoin seriously, it is just as good as owing nothing in Bitcoin Because we could wake up one day and all our investment is gone just as this scenario by the OP, and we would lose everything.

I think majority of us here weren't really serious when bitcoin was still very cheap. We never speculate then that bitcoin price will reach this far until we finally come to witness how valuable bitcoin is. We just bought when other people are buying, probably to ride the trend as well.

However, it's already a different case when bitcoin today is very expensive. Buying even a portion of bitcoin is already a big struggle. With that, sufficient knowledge about bitcoin safety and security is a must. Otherwise, all our hard-earned investments will go into waste because we were never aware the possibility of hacking our bitcoin from our own wallet.

I don't know much if the story can be made up, I don't really know what to look at to see through and find if it's really fishy, but on other hand your topic made much sence to me, I've heard stories of many persons who has lost their bitcoin holdings because they had very little information about how to secure their bitcoin holdings, we can even add people who left their bitcoin on exchanges that crashed and went bankrupt as ignorant cause I know some of then knew to store their holdings in cold wallets or hardware wallet but didn't take action, so it's true that a little ignorance and we can lose our holdings.

Your right , most person never thought bitcoin would become this valuable and some didn't take it serious and forgot about it, but this guy had only remembered that he had such amount of Bitcoin after a very long time and it sounds some how to me, most people would have remembered about 3 years ago or even when it reached 20k and some 2k but this guy had to wait so long to remember, the story seems made up in a way, and even if it's true then the guy must have been very ill educated about how to store his bitcoin, he should have kept copies to the file or even have hard copy well hidden, but as you said he must have been very less concerned about it and didn't believe in bitcoin.

Your right he is actually the first suspect to look at, but before we point fingers at him I sence a little carelessness from the owner of the bitcoin, for instance I can actually take my phone to a software engineer to fix a forgotten password or help me with an issue and in my phone was stored access to my money in my account if he has no idea he weould just fix my phone and give it back to me with no issues, but I think as OP said in one of his comments that the owner must have spilled some information about what Is contained in the hard drive to the data recovery guy and that must have triggered him, to be honest who would have access to 276 BTC and not be tempted, so if my speculation is true then I think the lesson learnt would be not to tell  people about your holdings for any reason.

Ohh, we'd consistently hear people lose their money from investing in Bitcoin but not realizing that they are not doing it right.
Yes, we can do nothing for these innocent people because it was not our responsibility to take care of their wallets and spoon-feed them. In fact, the moment they are investing in Bitcoin they are also aware of the risk situation and then help themselves to learn how to secure their funds but unfortunately, they just ignore it until the time has come.

Anyways, this mistake will not be over, not because people have also learned but because hackers are also improving their strategies. We need to be more cautious about our actions and make extra efforts to keep our wallets/funds safe.

No matter how scammers improve their strategy, they can't get access to anything unless we hand it over to them, if my seed phrase is well hidden and protected no hacker can get my bitcoin out of my wallet unless I tell them,  anyone who gets scammed is their faults they brought it upon themselves.

Your right most people get into bitcoin without learning about security and end up losing their holdings, I believe as we learn to invest, learning to secure your holdings should come next. Ignorance is no longer an excuse, everyone must prioritize learning if he doesn't want to be a victim in this times.

That is why knowledge in Bitcoin should never taken for granted because the things we fit to understand can make us to loss something very big that warm we regret. There is no end in  learning Bitcoin because Bitcoin is very Broad and one don't need to to relax with small understanding they have in bitcoin.  As a full time investor or trader it is important to take it as a challenge to gain more knowledge about Bitcoin because their is no limit in learning Bitcoin.
 
The reason why many people do have problems with bitcoin is because they fail to have more knowledge and when they eventually make mistakes just because of ignorance they have no choice than to learn the hard way.

Ignorance is a plague that people should purge themselves from, because it's really sad and foolish when people make avoidable mistakes, something that what it takes to learn is not far fetched, it's a pity that the guy in the story had to lose all his Bitcoin because he trusted so easily, now he doesn't know if it's the recovery guy that stole it or not. Lesson from this story is that it's not even safe to store our sensitive information online, because hackers are devicing means everyday to gain access into people's private information.

Fact is that wallet seed phrase that is stored offline is the best because there'd be no chances of your device being hacked and the information in it to be stolen, imagine the guy losing all the Bitcoin that he's been hodling for years because he didn't do the right thing. It's important that newbie investors in cryptocurrency should learn simple tips on how to protect their coins from hackers.

We need to keep learning and know what we are doing. Many things are happening and if we are not wise we could end up becoming a victim of little mistakes like this. It is not advisable for us to store our private key in electronics devices, it is wrong but many might not understand why and the reason behind it. This is because there had been many victims that indulge in saving theie Bitcoin seed phrase on electronic devices and the outcome was, they were not able to retrieve their wallet seed phrase again because it was hacked.

It's high time we need to secure our holding and understand the risk in exposing our data or seed phrase or even clicking on the so called airdrop links or even connecting our wallet to random link shared in telegram groups as there are numerous way we can be scammed but if we stick to basics of securing our data and sensitive information then no one can scan us. Unfortunately the person mentioned in OP has learnt his lesson the hard way.

I don’t think this guy literally do not know that handling his PC to someone stranger might put his assets into risk. He wouldn’t reached that amazing amount of bitcoin if he was not protecting his bitcoin wallet in the first place. Most probably, there’s another reason that all his bitcoins have ended up vanishing. I believe he might have handed his private keys to some bad guy without his consciousness. He might be drunk that time that made him create a stupid decision, and now all of a sudden he’s  giving all the blame to this recovery specialist which I think is actually innocent. I don’t know what’s the owner’s thinking but if this story is real, he might be living in mess right now totally upset and depressed.

That guy should have just said that he's trying to recover his data and not his bitcoins. You don't have to be vulgar if your holdings is involved with these recovery.

You don't trust anyone even your friends and relatives with these matters because if you're too vulgar and vocal, your tongue might slip and said somethings that you'll never like that will end up to something like this.

So, this idea was probably one of his carelessness. And it probably wouldn't be very successful to make a case for it unless he had strong evidence. There will definitely be a delivery history, right? And it would be a shame if we entrust such precious hard ware to be worked on by someone else and you don't see how it is done. Yes, maybe sometimes they don't allow you to see it. However, regardless of the condition and assets you have, I will look for a specialist who will allow me to see the work process. And when this accusation is no longer proven, what else can we do to prevent it? Oh yes, if the drive is indeed lost, there will be a transfer transaction, right? Just see when the time is, if the time is when the drive is still in the hands of the specialist, there is a possibility that he will do it. But if not, maybe this is just a fake story.

Its hard to believe that this guy went down entrusting his hard drive to some data recovery specialist without some caution. He must be trusting that person so much that he end up being deceived in the end. Although this might a made up story, but if ever it really happens, the person at fault is the one entrusting his hard drive to some stranger. Security should always be the first priority, rather than letting someone fix your hard drive when you know exactly that the assets inside are so much valuable that you can’t even afford to lose.

Well said. It's easier said than done to do something stupid like losing the keyphrase. Been there myself, but only for small test wallets.

I've learnt the hard way that if you have hardware wallets, have a spare duplicate ready and updated. In the event the first one fails or anything, you arent suddenly stuck waiting for one to arrive in the mail.

There are a few key lessons to learn from this case (by no means an exhaustive list here):

• You need redundant and safe offline recovery backups for your wallet(s).
• Do NOT use no or a weak unlock passphrase for your wallet(s).
• Store redundant offline backups of your wallet's unlock passphrase separately from your wallet(s) and your wallet's recovery data.
• Do NOT create digital copies (files or pictures or ...) of your wallet's recovery data on any online digital devices.
• Do NOT spread the word that you have substantial amounts of crypto coins.

It's a very common scenario that can happen to anybody using a laptop or a PC and there are two simple solutions to overcome this problem.

1. Buy a new hard drive and transfer your data to the new drive (expensive solution)
2. Restore your hard drive but before that transfer your BTC holdings to a different bitcoin address which you haven't used in your hard drive.

From,the story I think we are missing something out,giving the hard drive to the data recovery specialist to repair it...from my point the specialist is the one that made the guy know that his Bitcoin has been stolen.
 If we are trying to point fingers at the specialist, someone can't act of ignorance maybe the guy has already told the repairer the contents of the drive,so if it gets stolen is probably the fault of the guy for  been insensitive about assets or valuables.
But the question now is can someone Bitcoin gets stolen that way,i think is only those who know your key, password can access your Bitcoins.
 In essence we should be careful and sensitive.
To avoid such costly mistakes.

You have really explained it well and we all need to be very careful how we do things and make sure we stay safe in the market to prevent unnecessary regret that could happened because we do not understand what is needed for us to stay safe in the crypto market. Since everything activities we undergo in the market is always online, hackers could use this opportunity to steal from us if we don't have good knowledge of the crypto market. It is very important that we have concrete idea about the market so we don't easily fall out due to little mistakes of not keeping our wallet information safe.

He doesn't see this as a big deal because Bitcoin have not much value at the time but at the same time he is too careless, he has a reason for storing those Bitcoin, why give the same hdd to a stranger.

Looking at the value of bitcoin today must have affected this person so much, because the value is already enormous, compare to the year 2012, he can't even blame the tech guy, he was just smarter than him, this numbers of Bitcoin was never stolen from the owner, it was the owner that give it away by himself.

It will cost legs and kidneys to get that amount of Bitcoin back today, he will have this regrets for the rest of his life, let's hope he learned from his mistake but this is one of those mistakes that time can't heal, it will always stick to the heart.

I would say it's a careless act and also lack of knowledge because he might think the hard drive, he literarily doesn't have the technical ideal that the technician or anyone would have such thought of accessing into his privacies by having access to the hard drive. I feel pity for him because he never expected it.
Nomatter how learned someone would be, there would also be circumstances where you'd have to learn more from a mistake done.
About finding out it was the technician that took away the bitcoin from the guys wallet, I would suggest they check on the wallets transactions history and find out the date the stolen bitcoin was moved from the wallet and then consider when the guy took the hard drive to the technician, how long the hard drive has been with the technician and when the guy retrieved the hard drive from the technician too. Hopefully something traceable could come out of its.

The story you mentioned doesn't point to just a little ignorance but to maximum ignorance.

How is it possible for this massive amount of Bitcoin to be stored on a single hard drive? Why didn't he buy 5 to 10 hard drives to store backup copies of his wallet recovery information, or why didn't he purchase Hardware Wallet and its fire-resistant Seed Phrase Backup Tool, such as Cryptosteel? This person is genuinely reckless because if he knew that he had a massive fortune, he wouldn't have risked years of holding his Bitcoin in the blink of an eye, nor would he have trusted one of the data recovery specialists as he did. If the person could not take all rational measures and decisions to secure his seed Phareses, he would regret it for years of his life due to his ignorance and lack of experience.

The story doesn’t actually seem right but there are actually some few careless people who are careless with almost everything, or it could be due to the fact that they didn’t buy them wiith their hard earned money so they don’t actually know the value of it or they bought it so cheap and never believed it would be worth this much in a few years. Some people lost their coins after carelessly dumping their wallet and recovery phrase and after some time they start to realize how much there coins are worth and start to think of ways to recover their lost wallets and coins, only few are lucky to recover their coins and most people fail to recover their wallet and lose all their assets.

The earliest set of people who were lucky to own bitcoin when the price was low didn’t actually take security seriously, since it was not worth much and they didn’t know in a few years it would be a very valuable asset they took it as a joke and didn’t care if they lose it because it was nothing as at that time. Maybe this was what happened to the person in OP’s story, he probably didn’t know it would be worth a fortune in a few years and misplaced his seed phrase and security keys and lost access to the bitcoins.

Security is now a vital part of owning a bitcoin because of its current value, no one can afford to lose even one bitcoin not to talk of 276 bitcoins.

If you observe very well in that case that happened for that guy to lose his BTC, you will discovered that the guy is part of this category of people who just heard that if you invest little money on BTC and hodl for long you will achieve huge amount of money without settle down to know how to write the seeds phrase in a secure please for future purpose.

 Sometimes, things like this happen for other people to learn their lesson so that they will be careful where they store their BTC and, if you use good wallet to store your BTC and you keep the seeds phrase in a safe place, you don't have anything to fear.

Well, I'm just wondering why for 8 years in crypto they never know what is the best thing to do in order to secure their funds. For that long, I don't think they are still a newbie and unaware of the market risk and hacking incidents. They are not ignorant, they are too unlucky to be a target of hackers because even old-timers sometimes make mistakes.

This is the reason why we should not store our money in one address but rather spread it. That scenario shows us how important is to not just set aside our fund's security but instead, make focus on it and ensure that it is safe at least 99%. Otherwise, we give these hackers easy access to our wallets. 

Sadly, there are a lot of people that are still into that thing. They will only invest but they are not eager to know how they're going to make themselves comfortable by keeping it to their own wallets and how to prevent people from invading their wallets to avoid such hacks, physically and online.

It's too expensive for the lesson that they have to learn. They don't treat it as if it's the most important thing that they need to secure and that's why the are too vulnerable while the people that they whom trust sees their vulnerability, they take advantage of them. I even have a laptop have it repaired and even though I have a wallet installed there with not that much, I still check it out and never lose my eyes on the technician and that's what is giving importance to your thing because it's not just about the wallet but also about the parts that you're allowing these techs to fix them.

I guess you didn't read through the topic, OP said he wasn't scammed but lost his holdings out of carelessness to a data recovery specialist due to his hard drive that stored his seed phrase was bad, so the whole thing here is either the story is fake or the data specialist somehow knew that he had seed phrase stored there.

Yes that guy has been too old in bitcoin to be less knowledgeable about security and most of all he was a minner, doesn't the whole tech thing means you should know some basic things, I don't think a minner that only in Bitcoin with over 273 bitcoin would be that careless to store his seed phrase in only one hard drive without no alternative.

The first mistake of the guy was trust a device to hold his bitcoin keys there have been warnings of wear of this devices and that’s what happened. Firstly I see this story mor like fiction and not real, the data recovery specialist must have a knowledge about the whole bitcoin thing and was also aware that the drive brought for repairs has the seed phrase either it was the owner that told him or he cracked the drive and saw the keys. This is the only two scenario because seed phrase on a device doesn’t mean that bitcoin was on that device because bitcoin are stored on the blockchain and only keys stays on the device which means someone has had access to those keys and moved the bitcoin elsewhere.

You shouldn't focus on single addresses but rather on wallets. Leave it to your wallet software to manage your wallet's addresses and try as early as possible to use a decent hardware wallet to secure your private keys (forget closed-source Ledger crap).
Software-only wallets are only secure if you have a strict air-gapped setup where the private keys are in the air-gapped cold section and your online hot wallet section is watch-only, i.e. without exposing private keys to an online device.

You need to have redundant secure backups of your wallets. No matter what, period! Storage devices can fail: no backups, no mercy!



The guy who lost his coins bought and/or mined his Bitcoins back in 2012 and used a BitcoinGUI wallet (there's no more details in the reddit post about this). Back then as far as I remember there were no HD wallets with backup recovery words (don't remember when Armory wallet showed up first). So that family member of the reddit poster used BitcoinGUI (today Bitcoin Core) with a wallet.dat file full of independant random private keys. If you had to backup such a legacy wallet, you had wallet.dat file backups.

Apparently the guy who lost his coins didn't have that. Big and now very costly fault!



As soon as your coin's value exceeds a four-figure $$$ you should make some risk assessment of how to prevent certain loss cases. I would use encrypted file systems to mitigate exposing my wallets to device theft. An encrypted file system also prevents exposing your valuable data and wallets to repair technicians.

Show me a repair shop that allows you to never loose your eyes on those who handle your device. Not impossible but somewhat unlikely. If it's not the storage device to repair, you could ask that the first thing they do for the repair job is to extract the storage device and hand it over to you so that a technician wouldn't ever have a look on the device's content.



Where do you phantasize "have been warnings of wear of this device" from the quoted reddit post or OP's post? Seriously!


To my knowledge there were no wallets in 2012 with "seed phrase" or more precisely mnemonic recovery words and the story is about a guy who bought/mined coins in 2012. Don't make assumptions out of nowhere, this doesn't help the topic here.

We simply do NOT know what that guy told the repair technician, nor what was on the corrupted hard drive besides the wallet.dat file. There's simply not enough details exposed in this story and topic by OP.

Was the wallet.dat not secured with a decent wallet passphrase? We don't know.
Was the wallet.dat wallet passphrase in clear-text in a file on the harddrive? We don't know.
Was the wallet.dat wallet not secured at all? We don't know.


Re-reading the reddit posts again, the story seems a bit wacky. Reddit OP speaks first of a corrupted harddrive, then later in the reddit thread it's a thumbdrive. Both are completely different storage technology with their own very different technical issues that could arise.

Nevertheless whatever is true, from every loss story there are lessons to learn from.