I'm Locked out of my Wallet... Now What?
Ah, the lovely world of Cryptocurrency! Crypto offers new and exciting opportunities - self custody of assets. You can hold several million dollars in crypto in your house, whereas having millions of dollars in cash can be very problematic. Crypto is fairly new and “best practices” aren’t as widely known as they should be.
This leads to problems. A major one of these problems is getting locked out of your wallet. Don’t worry, you may have several options, including if you have lost your hardware wallet in the trash, drive failure, or if the non-custodial wallet service you were using decides overnight to shutdown and changes your password without you knowing (true story — see our case study on EthereumWallet.com).
So, what do you do when you’re locked out?
We have three steps you absolutely need to follow once you realize you’re locked out of your wallet.
Step 1:
Assess the situation - Understand where the failure is. Is it a software failure or a service failure? Or did your harddrive die? Did you lose your wallet .dat file? Or did you forget where your crypto was stored? Do you have the seed phrase written down and stored in a safe place?
Step 2:
Get your ducks (data) in a row. – It’s important to get all of your information and assets in the same place and depending on your assessment of the situation those assets and that information can be different. Write down as many potential passwords as you might have or can remember. Get your public and private keys, or fragments of them. Get your .dat file and any hardware you may have. Get as much information associated with the wallet as possible all in one place. This is vitally important so you have all the resources you may need in one place and available.
IMPORTANT: Under no circumstances should you attempt to tackle the problem yourself! If you’re locked out, the odds are that you will do more harm than good and potentially lose access to your wallet and your crypto permanently.
Step 3:
Get help. - There are legitimate, less than legitimate, and somewhat dangerous options out there for recovering your wallet’s contents. Some require an up front fee with no guarantee of solution, some require a percentage once the wallet is recovered, and some require your first born child’s social security number. For someone who isn’t familiar with the crypto-recovery landscape this can be a daunting task and the overwhelm can push an already stressed person to just choose the first option they find.
If the price is right and anecdotal evidence gives you enough confidence to risk the contents of your wallet to someone on the internet, that is your prerogative. We, however, do not recommend that.
If you’re looking for the best chance of cracking your wallet, hardware or software, and you want to be sure that your identity, data, and crypto will remain secure, we recommend going with an established company that offers crypto recovery services, especially with the upcoming regulatory compliance regime. These companies have the established connections within the information security and blockchain industry to have the best engineers, most up to date tools, an independent lab, and their own ability to research and develop new exploit tools.
”On a long enough time horizon all crypto wallets will become vulnerable.” ~ @weldpond
Established companies have a vested interest in building a proven track record, developing relationships with established authorities and platforms in the industry, and reuniting more people with their money than any other option available.
Here at Unciphered, that is what we do. We have a team of cryptanalysts, software reverse engineers, and hardware reverse engineers – so we never need to subcontract out work. We have a $5M silicon engineering lab that can extract your private keys and other secure data from your hardware wallets and we have software cracking tools that we have developed that are not known outside the company that allows us to crack more types of wallets faster than any other legitimate or illegitimate option on the market today. We not only verify our customer inquiries to make sure that your wallet belongs to you, but we keep our customers’ identities secret and secure. We also do compliance checks so someone can’t give us someone else’s stolen property. No other option available to you can make these claims.
Verdict: Your best chance for crypto recovery is to submit an inquiry Here (https://www.unciphered.com/letsgo) first for a free evaluation and let our team look into your lockout situation.
