A wallet.dat on a dead drive. A keystore was erased during cleaning. The coins were purchased in 2013 on a laptop stored in the attic. Cryptocurrency recovery is indeed a legitimate and valuable industry, but also an area filled with so many "magical" claims. This bench performs recoverable cases correctly and labels the unrecoverable ones for free as well; this is because when money is involved, integrity and truth are what we give our clients.
Wallet jobs will be successful if some form of the cryptographic material is still located in a physical location such as wallet files from failed drives (wallet.dat, keystore JSON files and app data folders), which can be recovered by doing "standard" drive recovery using the search function to find wallet signatures. Deleted wallet files race against overwrites, same as any other deleted file; however, these files are carved using software that understands exactly what wallet structure looks like. Old computers or media (for a computer, simply its drive) can be searched for wallets you had prior to the time the value of those coins became relevant. And lastly, corrupted wallet files can have enough structural damage repaired so that they can at least allow keys to be extracted. If a wallet was found encrypted with a passphrase, the passphrase still protects it: upon return of the file, your passphrase opens it. Hardware wallets are another story, because typically what one wants to recover from a hardware wallet is the seed phrase.
No seed phrase, no private key and no wallet file surviving anywhere means no recovery, from us or anyone: the maths that makes a coin "yours" will likewise render it irretrievable, to you or anyone else, without those keys. And the same goes for a strong, unremembered passphrase on an otherwise complete wallet (theatrical brute-force attacks on today's KDFs are sold by the hour) and drives whose relevant sectors have actually been overwritten. This is said on the page, primarily, because desperate individuals are the most common target of this field. Any 'recovery service' requesting money prior to answering truthfully whether your actual key material exists should be viewed as the risk it represents. Our diagnostic answers that question first, free, and then the fixed quote covers only work with a real chance.
Often truly yes: pre-2016 computers that have their hard drives in good working condition are still the best place to hunt for your lost data. The search process will be very methodical as opposed to being speculation-based. First get a quote, via the form or by calling us. Then send the drive alone to us. We do not accept the entire machine. A local computer shop should be able to remove it from your old machine. List all of the names of wallet software programs you vaguely remember. Our diagnostic then reports what was found prior to you receiving a price for recovering the information.
The engineering on this is just like every other clicking drive (image first, gently, weak spots last); however, the searching for items within that image has been optimised for wallets. What the value should change is how much you are willing to retry before giving up: simply stop supplying power. Our pricing remains at the same bench-priced levels; we do not take a percentage of what is contained within the item being tested.
Honestly, no: modern wallet encryption was designed to prevent brute-force attacks from occurring, and services that offer unlimited attempts are offering nothing but an hourly rate for false hopes. We can discuss with you the merits of targeted testing if you have narrowed down your list of possible passphrases. A truly blank list is a true blank, and we will say so without cost.