A father-son team claims to have found $6M in lost crypto.

Crypto users can't get their money back when they lose their private keys or get conned out of their coins by con artists. In most cases, their crypto will be lost forever. But according to the father and son team from New Hampshire, all hope is not lost. They claim to have recovered more than $6 million in lost crypto during their career.

Chris and Charles Brooks run Crypto Asset Recovery, a service that helps crypto users recover lost wallets. They also provide fraud monitoring for victims of crypto theft.

In a conversation with Cointelegraph, Chris Brooks, father of co-founder Charles Brooks, said that 70% of the two customers come to them after losing their Bitcoin (BTC) wallet password. These users sometimes have no password backups, so if they lose their passwords, their wallets are difficult to recover without the help of a specialist.

“BIP39 recovery seed [generated by most modern wallets]In the year It was only introduced in 2013 and didn't begin to gain widespread adoption until 2015, so for people with older wallets, this isn't an option for them, he said. Although the wallet is relatively new, there are still “a few wallets that you should look for seed words if you want to support it.”

In these cases, if a user forgets their password, they lose access to their wallet because they have no seed password backup they can use to restore it. Even so, many of these wallets can still be cracked using brute force guessing software, Chris said.

Even if a user has a backup of the seed word, they may have made a mistake when copying it. For example, they may have left out a word, or they may be getting an error when trying to enter the word. Chris says that he can often recover these wallets as well by forcing the missing word or correct word order.

Charles Brooks says he recently helped a “Casasius Coin” collector find a lost wallet key. A Cassius coin is a physical coin that holds a Bitcoin private key on its reverse side. The private key is only 26 to 36 characters long, instead of the usual 51 characters. On the front of the coin are the first eight characters of the Bitcoin address corresponding to the key. According to Charles, the collector accidentally tore off part of the coin's film, rendering “5 or 6 characters” illegible. Using the remaining characters and a snippet of the Bitcoin address from the front of the coin, Charles was able to use software to guess the missing characters into a private key.

Related: Crypto's Indiana Jones? Coinbase exec helps recover $322K in lost crypto

The duo recently launched a fraud monitoring service for users who have had their crypts stolen by con artists. In cases where a customer has been defrauded, “[W]e takes the hash of the transaction [the victim] Send money to the scammer; [and] We trace those funds into the fraudster's wallet,” Charles said. After establishing the scammer's address, or “address cluster,” they attempt to associate it with “a known entity, usually not an alternate one.” Once this entity is identified, “they prepare a report and help the customer report the matter to law enforcement.”

Unlike crypto lost from a forgotten password, Charles warned that counterfeit funds are often lost forever. The only way to recover them is by involving the police and the courts:

“We do not see many opportunities in recovering fraud cases. Once the funds are in someone else's wallet, […] You have to hunt them down with the police and get their ledger, or whatever it contains, so we'll tell you. [clients] The chance of recovery is very low.

Even so, some crypto users may benefit from tracking stolen funds and reporting them to the police, he said. Charles said law enforcement is working on a few cases the group has reported, but none of those cases are closed yet.

The two said they lost $6 million in crypto through forgotten passwords, missing seed words and other issues. “We've been very successful in recovering lost wallets,” says Charlie. We have about a 45% or 46% success rate when someone seeks help with a cracked password.

Crypto users have lost billions of dollars over the years by forgetting passwords and losing passwords. According to estimates from ChannelAnalysis, more than 20% of the Bitcoin supply is in wallets that are not controlled by anyone.