Bitcoin Forum

So I quite often get junk electronics, usually as scrap for precious metal recovery. Computers hard drives, usb, phones, tablets. I pick them up from electronic stores and repair shops at a good rate or just out of a scrap heap. Some of them still function and have data on them. Is there a way I can quickly scan a device to see if there is a btc or altcoin wallet stored on them? I'm thinking a program wouldn't be too hard to make, maybe something that just looks for a program using the sha256 protocols. But I have no up to date programing skills. I could look through manually but the odds are against me and its time consuming lol.But I do handle thousands of devices a year so who knows?
It would be pretty sweet to find an old wallet, keys stored on the device and have some free crypto worth who knows what. Has anyone heard of anything like this?

You would have to manually plug them in, one by one and write a script that scans the drive/device for any files named wallet.dat. Its possible to write a program to search a defined pattern in the files to analyse and get the wallet.dat though the first would probably work better.
Definitely, but they most likely would be encrypted in the first place so its quite useless.

would a wallet.dat search work for altcoins as well? Or only BTC wallets?
In what way could they be encrypted? Aren't the keys what you need to decrypt the wallet? Sorry I'm not a programmer lol. I was thinking that if they were careless enough to throw away their wallet, they probably didn't care enough to put much security in it.

Most altcoins I've ever encountered names their wallet file wallet.dat.
They can have password
They likely just forgot that they had the wallet in it and the chances of it being encrypted is relatively high.

I see, thanks for your help. If I find one, I'll be sure to update this thread with my retirement plan, lmao.