Since there is no bank or private institution in the nature of cryptocurrencies that stores users’ assets and private keys, the responsibility of keeping them rests with the individual holder, who can sometimes lose access to their crypto wallet for any reason. .
Joe Grand, also known as Kingpin, is an American computer engineer and hardware hacker who is helping these people access their bitcoin (BTC) wallets after losing access to their devices or accounts.
In one of his attempts, he helped a man named LaVar Sanders gain access to crypto on his phone after Sanders locked himself out of a device he believed was potentially Could be millions of dollars.
how did the process go
Grand documented the entire process in a YouTube video published on June 23. Commenting on his work in the video, he explained:
“Really, anything is hackable if you put in enough time and resources. Part of hacking is that you never really know what’s going to happen, even if you’ve done it multiple times. It’s always going to happen.” It feels like magic. There’s always a risk of something going wrong, especially with the type of attack I was doing.”
Grant rolled up his sleeve and began to work his magic, which involved removing the device’s memory, where its unlocked swipe password was stored, finding out what it was, gaining access to the wallet, and then looking up whether there is money in it or not.
The whole process took about a week, but the end result was unfavourable, as it showed that Sanders had underestimated the value of bitcoin in his wallet. Specifically, he only had 0.00300861 BTC, which was worth $105 at the time of making the video.
Meanwhile, bitcoin was trading at $20,898 at press time, which means that it is currently priced even lower around $63.
Not all bitcoin is lost
However, there was one last encrypted wallet that was left to break, giving hope that all that work was not in vain. As it turned out, it was not. Although Sanders lost most of the money in his wallet, the balance was larger than his investments from July 2016, amounting to $400.
Explaining this to Sanders, Grand said:
“A lot of it, unfortunately, went to a place called Bit Blender. The problem is that website went down in 2019, I believe a big part of it is gone. The good news is (.. .) $1,800 or $2,000 [worth of Bitcoin]Which is still better than your investment.”
It’s one of Grand’s gigs that proved his claim that “everything is hackable”, even though sometimes, as he put it, “the money isn’t.” However, sometimes it happens, as he proved at the end of January.
Indeed, Feinbold reported at the time cracking the Treasure One hardware wallet with over $2 million worth of crypto by Joe Grand and electrical engineer Dan Reich. After detailing the entire process in a YouTube video, Trezor responded by saying that the exploit they used had already been fixed.
Watch the full video of Grand’s hacking process:
