A woman named Rhonda has utilized the assistance of some friendly “white hat” hackers to help her recover her lost bitcoin stash.
Rhonda Really Needed Her BTC Back
Back in 2013, when bitcoin was trading for around $80, Rhonda got into the crypto craze and decided to purchase six units of the popular currency. In an interview, she stated:
I used to listen to a radio talk show, and they started talking about crypto and bitcoin, so I got interested. Back then, buying it was so complicated, but I fumbled my way through the process and bought my coins.
While she used some of her crypto throughout the following year or so, she mostly forgot about them until 2017 when the currency rose to its then all-time high of nearly $20,000 per unit. She immediately got excited and ran to her computer hoping to cash out. However, she encountered a problem in that she was missing some of her login information. She said:
I realized 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. It was awful. I tried everything for months, but it was hopeless, so I kind of gave up.
After several years of running through the mill, the price of bitcoin rose to a whopping $50,000 in 2021. That’s more than 600 times what Rhonda had paid for her initial units. This made her nuts, and she realized she had to get her hands on her bitcoin stash at all costs. She took to the internet immediately to see who could potentially help her out and she came across a father and son team named Chris and Charlie Brooks who claimed to be “crypto treasure hunters.” She comments:
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. 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!
A Big Fat Wallet, Indeed
In Rhonda’s wallet was roughly $175,000 – more than three and a half times what she had purchased in 2013. Describing how she used the funds, she said:
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.
As for the rest, she’s keeping them in a secure hardware wallet where nobody can touch them. Right now, she’s in a bit of a tough spot in that bitcoin has fallen to about $43,000 per unit at the time of writing. She’s waiting and hoping that the currency can pick up speed again before the year is out.
