Hackers Help Woman Track Down Crypto Fortune After She Bought Bitcoins For £60 Each In 2013
Hackers have helped a woman access her Bitcoin fortune after she lost some of the login details for her wallet.
Rhona from Illinois, US, bought six Bitcoins in 2013 for about $80 (£60) each. She spent some of her cryptocurrency over the next year, but soon forgot about it.
Understandably, she then went into a state of panic after seeing headlines in 2017 that the value of her bitcoin had soared and realised she was unable cash it out, the BBC reports.
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She was missing key login details to access her Bitcoin wallet, where her cash was stored.
This was particularly annoying since at this point the value of individual Bitcoin had risen to nearly $20,000 (£14,000).
Rhonda says: "I realised then that my printout had missed some digits on the end of my wallet identifier.
"I had a piece of paper with my password but no idea what my wallet ID was.
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"It was awful. I tried everything for months but it was hopeless. So I kind of gave up."
Fast forward to spring 2021 and the value of Bitcoin had jumped to a mega $50,000 (£37,000), which was over 600 times more than what she had paid eight years prior.
Thankfully, she managed to come across internet hackers and crypto treasure hunters Chris and Charlie Brooks, who also happen be father and son.
"After talking to the guys online for a while I trusted them enough to hand over all the details I could remember. Then I waited," she says.
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"Eventually we sat down together on a video call and watched everything happen.
"Chris opened the wallet and there it was. I just felt so relieved!"
The value of her three-and-a-half bitcoin at that point was a whopping $175,000 (£128,000).
"I gave Chris and Charlie their 20 percent, then the first thing I did was take out $10,000 worth of my coins to help my daughter Megan through college."
Charlie, who joined his dad's business Crypto Asset Recovery in 2017, revealed: "Most of the time we can't actually tell what's inside the wallet so we have to trust the client that there is an amount that's worth the work we put in.
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"We had a case over the summer where the person told us they had 12 Bitcoin.
"We were obviously very professional with him but behind the computer screen we're like jumping around high-fiving each other, all excited about the potential payday.
"We spent probably 60 hours of computer server time plus about 10 hours with the client piecing together all the clues he could give us.
"Then on the video call we cracked it open - and it was completely empty."
Yikes.
Topics: Cryptocurrency
Anish Vij