-Tina Lah thought her accumulated crypto currency was lost for good.
-In one final grasp at hope, she called on CryptoAssetRecovery.com LLC to gain access to her crypto wallet.
By : Mohamed Elkholy
Father and son duo Chris and Charlie Brooks, founders of CryptoAssetRecovery.com LLC, have successfully retrieved yet another crypto wallet. This time, they have returned $100k worth of Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) to their rightful owner.
In late 2021 Tina Lah, a CryptoAssetRecovery.com LLC customer from Slovenia, was devastated to find that she had accidentally destroyed the notebook paper that housed her 24-word seed phrase to a wallet holding 2.28 BTC and 2.1 ETH.
These collectively were worth $100k. In a desperate attempt to remember her seed phrase, Lah carefully examined the old notebook. On the page that was once underneath the password, there were indentations from when she originally recorded the seed phrase years ago.
Though the indentations did not reveal the seed phrase in its entirety, Lah was able to get a rough idea of what it could be. So, she called CryptoAssetRecovery.com LLC to do what they do best: recover the rest of her seed phrase and grant her access to her crypto currency. All Chris and Charlie Brooks need is a customer’s best guess of their seed phrase. Then, they can take it from there.
Chris Brooks, co-founder of CryptoAssetRecovery.com LLC, said: "When a client comes to us with a problem with their 24-word seed phrase (as Tina did) there are too many possible variations to check using paper and pencil. If you assume that there's only a single mistake -- either in the order that the words are written, or in the actual choice of words, then there are nearly 50,000 different possible permutations.
“If you allow for more than 1 mistake, the number of possible permutations quickly climbs into the billions and beyond. Even though Tina did a wonderful sleuthing job in recovering the words from their imprint on another piece of paper, there was no way that she could have resolved this by hand."
From the information they were given, Chris and Charlie got to work in this treasure hunt - the hunt to figure out the correct seed phrase. They created hundreds of thousands of seed phrase combinations to try before ultimately recovering her wallet.
Tina Lah said: “I moved my crypto to a Ledger hardware wallet a couple of years ago. At the beginning of 2021 I wanted to access my funds, and the Ledger prompted me to perform a software update. After the update finished, my friend (who was helping me), created a new 24 word phrase, rather than using the existing one. Of course,10 minutes later he realized his mistake and asked for the old 24 word phrase -- but, by then I had already erased the original 24 word phrase from the paper as I had written the words with a pencil!
“I could still see the imprint of the original 24 words on the little sheet of paper in my notebook, so I tried my best to copy them exactly. I did some research and realized that these 24 word phrases come from a dictionary of about 2,000 words, so I looked each word up in that dictionary to see if it would help confirm the word. I was very confident with many of the words -- but, I was essentially guessing on 5 of them. I tried them manually, but there were just too many possibilities. So, eventually, I just set it all aside for more than a year.”
She added: “On February 10th of this year I saw an article about Chris and Charlie. I reached out and we got on a Zoom call the next day. I sent my words over after the call -- and in less than a week Chris wrote to say that they had recovered my funds!”
One old notebook indentation and some digital elbow grease saved Tina Lah roughly 100 thousand dollars. She is one of many customers who have retrieved their crypto currency thanks to Chris and Charlie Brooks.
