New Bitcoin Scam

[morantis]

I saw this in an ad and do not know that website.  Everyone remembers the old business that promised to help people find "lost money".  Some of that was real, some was not.  It would tell you that perhaps an unknown uncle left you $1000 after dying and you have yet to claim it...blah.blah.

The new scam I saw promises to recover your lost BTC from old wallets.  There was very little information and I think they tell you that you are getting "your" lost Bitcoins back.  Either that or they promise that you can recover Bitcoins lost by others since the beginning of the blockchain, not sure. 

FACTS.....If you lose your pass phrase, it is gone.  Those coins are gone forever.  Cracking that pass-phase will get you less money than simply using the same CPU/GPU to mine Bitcoins.  If you put the passphrase in a text file on your computer and deleted it, that file may be recovered in some cases, the same is true for backup wallets.  But information that is gone is gone.  You cannot break into the wallet and no one else can.  Anyone with hacking experience will tell you, cracking a five character, alpha-only password can take days or weeks.  There is simply not enough time or power to crack a ten word random phrase.  If you lost it on a computer and have not formatted the hard drive, DO NOTHING and maybe we can help you find the file, but do not buy into a service that tells you it can find the pass-phrase for an old wallet or wallets!

[mobnepal]

Finding deleted file with pass phrase may be easier with some of the recovery tool but remember you shouldn't have format hard drive after you delete the file. Try some of recovery tool rather than getting scamed by those sites promising to recover pass phrase. Nicely described brother hope some may save themselves from being scam after reading this.

[Kprawn]

Finding deleted file with pass phrase may be easier with some of the recovery tool but remember you shouldn't have format hard drive after you delete the file. Try some of recovery tool rather than getting scamed by those sites promising to recover pass phrase. Nicely described brother hope some may save themselves from being scam after reading this.

Some data can be retrieved, even after the disk was formatted. I have done it before with Forensic Recovery Software. Some say it's even possible to recover data that was lost

after multiple formats, but I have not seen that been done. Here is some info that may come in handy --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_recovery_software

I use Hiren, but most commercial software has been removed from the latest versions.  ....No need to ask scammers to retrieve your lost data. 

[NorrisK]

If you lost your coins and you have no way to get them back anyway, what is there to lose for you?

In the worst case you still don't have the coins and you have given the scammer potential access to them. In the best case the service takes its fee (probably a heavy 25% or so) and gives back the rest.

I don't see real negatives if you are 100% sure you would otherwise never see them ever again anyway.

[helloeverybody]

Finding deleted file with pass phrase may be easier with some of the recovery tool but remember you shouldn't have format hard drive after you delete the file. Try some of recovery tool rather than getting scamed by those sites promising to recover pass phrase. Nicely described brother hope some may save themselves from being scam after reading this.

Some data can be retrieved, even after the disk was formatted. I have done it before with Forensic Recovery Software. Some say it's even possible to recover data that was lost

after multiple formats, but I have not seen that been done. Here is some info that may come in handy --> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_recovery_software

I use Hiren, but most commercial software has been removed from the latest versions.  ....No need to ask scammers to retrieve your lost data. 

I had to factory reset my phone after getting a water leak. I tried many recovery programs, Unfortunatly my wallet was never seen again

[shorena]

-snip-
FACTS.....If you lose your pass phrase, it is gone.  Those coins are gone forever.  Cracking that pass-phase will get you less money than simply using the same CPU/GPU to mine Bitcoins.  If you put the passphrase in a text file on your computer and deleted it, that file may be recovered in some cases, the same is true for backup wallets.  But information that is gone is gone.  You cannot break into the wallet and no one else can.  Anyone with hacking experience will tell you, cracking a five character, alpha-only password can take days or weeks.  There is simply not enough time or power to crack a ten word random phrase.  If you lost it on a computer and have not formatted the hard drive, DO NOTHING and maybe we can help you find the file, but do not buy into a service that tells you it can find the pass-phrase for an old wallet or wallets!

You assume that the previous owner that used the password remembers nothing about it. And that is nonsense. I did a test with someone I know personally a while back. I asked them to create a secure 8 symbols password with lower, upper, numerical and special symbols. 8^(26+26+10+8) combinations. I asked them to memorize the password as good as possible (they only had a few minutes) and write it on a card. I kept that card for 1 week and asked what they still knew about the password. It was not much, but it was enough to brute-force the rest given a few weeks time.

This is the reason why you may not be able to brute force the wallet for someone that stole the file, but you may be able to brute force the wallet for someone that actually came up with and used the password.

All that being said, its probably a scam anyway.

[maokoto]

you are totally right. Even to recover deleted files in a computer may be a matter of just some minutes or take lots of hours, trying several different recovery apps.

I know it by experience.

[AtheistAKASaneBrain]

Pass phrasses can be brute forced if the algorithm is super efficient and the compute doing is is insanely powerful, AND it will require that the password was rather simple to be able to properly bruteforce it with reasonable expectations, other than that it's just impossible.

[27QVUTZj8rgZP1]

Some data can be retrieved, even after the disk was formatted.

That is true if the user did a "quick format", which does not rewrite any data. But if the data that is there gets re-written over and over... Then it is possibly gone and no simple thing can recover that, if at all.

End of opinion.

[gentlemand]

There are legit services that do such a thing such as wallet recovery services. They take a cut of what they recover and I don't think there've been anything other than satisfied customers.

I'd only go with them or someone similar who had a lengthy and verifiable track record.

[pereira4]

In the future there will be millions of similar scams. Right now we have all those "Niggerian Prince" type of email spams, in the future those people will use Bitcoin because of how easy it is to scam people that isn't wary of what they are doing with their computer.

[gentlemand]

In the future there will be millions of similar scams. Right now we have all those "Niggerian Prince" type of email spams, in the future those people will use Bitcoin because of how easy it is to scam people that isn't wary of what they are doing with their computer.

In the future for better or worse I don't think many people will be in charge of their own private keys. The ones that do will probably be hard core enough not to fall for such deviance.