Locked Wallet - Death of Family Member

[efoundmasu44]

Hello,

My close friend reached out for help on this and I feel stupid and bad that I couldn’t help him out. I’m the only one he knows, other than his dad who worked with crypto. I just have some eth, btc nothing like his dad. He was heavy into the technology and invested in coins like EOS.
His father passed away last week unexpected so he didn’t leave them a layout or plan on how to recover his funds. They do have a trust, will and death certificate along with any identification documents to justify that he did in fact leave all funds to them (my friend and his mother). None of the documents contained private keys or phrases he was actually really secure about this kind of stuff and doesn’t have anything in the cloud. Well he had a roboform account with offline data that we could only read the file name unless you input the master password which they have ZERO idea what it is. I mean literally every time they’ve needed a password he showed me some texts when he had sent a password for a site or something and its like $5dcjdken5#hd84 generated from a password manager. I dont want to make this a roboform issue but they legit said they cant help because of the way he setup his app offline and the only bright side is we could guess as many times as we want.

He has a Anchor wallet and Scatter wallet and a ledger. The bad news is that I guess he wasn’t aware that when the ledger says “2 attempt left, 1 attempt left” that it wipes out the device. He thought it just restarts or something. The good news is that they have his phone so the ledger app didn’t really have much in there and they think this Scatter and Anchor wallet contain most of the funds. Scatter we cant see , but Anchor wallet only asks you for the password when your trying to send or something so we see all the balances of all his wallets and the public keys.

We are able to create a .json backup of the wallets from Anchor but we cant get the password. We tried restoring the wallet in a new PC and it asks us for a password to setup initially, then when we import the wallet it needs the old wallets password, understandably.

I know this is like asking Apple to hack a iPhone, but is there a way to “trick” or somehow get the password to his Anchor or scatter wallet. We think this is going to be the master password to unlock everything else because I noticed roboform doesn’t pop up like how it does on websites when password is needed so we dont think he constantly went back and forth with the apps for his web wallets. This password could in turn lead us to get his roboform which hopefully has the ledger keys on it.

But like I said, the family is willing to provide anything necessary to prove legitimacy and doesn’t mind waiting a few weeks or something so wallet inactivity could be seen. I know the blockchain itself itself makes it impossible to retrieve the money from developers or something but please help me help them out I truly feel like $%8# now because he would help me out with crypto and the one time I could’ve helped him, I cant.

He had life changing money in there, enough to pay off their mortgage (which he was going to do I remember he had staked EOs or TELOS and was waiting for the waiting period to cash out his stake, he asked me if I took his advice and invested in it because I guess it recently blew up.)

Any advice is much appreciated guy, thank you.

[LoyceV]

None of the documents contained private keys or phrases he was actually really secure about this kind of stuff

If there is no paper trail of any (well hidden!) seed phrases or passwords, then the password manager could indeed be the best place to search.
However:

he had sent a password for a site or something and its like $5dcjdken5#hd84 generated from a password manager

Proper passwords are meant to withstand brute-forcing, and this sounds like a strong password. If the master password is like this, it may very well be impossible to recover.

doesn’t mind waiting a few weeks or something so wallet inactivity could be seen

None of that is going to matter if a decent password was used.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Do you or your friend have any idea about how his father backed up his seed phrases? If you can find a written down seed phrase somewhere, then that could potentially solve all your issues and bypass all the problems you are having with passwords.

In the absence of a seed phrase or any clue at all as to what his passwords might be, then the only option remaining to you is to try to brute force them using a program like btcrecover or hashcat. Although as Loyce has pointed out, it sounds like he was very careful with his passwords and had very good OPSEC, meaning any master password or wallet password is likely going to be impossible to brute force from scratch without any idea as to what it might be.

If he had any funds on a centralized exchange, then by providing copies of his death certificate and will as proof he has passed away and your friend is his legal heir, then you might be able to recover any such coins, although that obviously doesn't help with his wallets.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

https://bringbackmycrypto.com/ they both offer password recovery services.

My first time hearing about bringbackmycrypto.com

Also, the site you linked does not seem to load from my side. I don't know  if it's just me or everyone else, Maybe someone can check and confirm if it does load from their device.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Maybe someone can check and confirm if it does load from their device.

It loads for me, but I would also not trust it.

I, like you, have never heard of this service before despite helping lots of people who have lost access to coins or forgotten passwords. I can find no independent reviews or even a single mention of it anywhere else online. A huge chunk of their website is blatantly plagiarized from various sources with no attribution. The site was only registered last year, despite having blog posts dated as far back as 2016, clearly designed to trick people in to thinking they have been around much longer than they have. The blog posts, incidentally, are also plagiarized.