Man regains access to his $3M Bitcoin wallet after 11 years thanks to hacker offering solution
Published on Sep 23, 2025 at 9:04 AM (UTC+4)
by Claire Reid
Last updated on Sep 23, 2025 at 8:49 PM (UTC+4)
Edited by
Kate Bain
A man has managed to regain access to his Bitcoin wallet containing $3 million after being locked out of it for more than a decade.
The owner of the crypto wallet had, quite sensibly, put a randomly generated password on the wallet.
However, not so sensibly, he managed to lose the password, locking himself out of his own crypto wallet.
Desperate to get his hands back on his 43.6 Bitcoin, he reached out to a hacker who was able to help.
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How he got back into his Bitcoin wallet
In a bid to keep his Bitcoin safe, the man used a random password generator called RoboForm.
He kept the password in an encrypted file, which later got corrupted, locking him out.
That was the beginning of his nightmare.
Eleven years on, he saw his Bitcoin wallet explode in value from around $4,000 to a whopping $3 million.
That would be incredible news if he had access to it. But of course, he didn’t.
So he reached out to hacker and YouTuber Joe Grand for help.
After taking a look into the tech, Grand managed to reverse engineer the version of RoboForm the man had used and spotted a flaw.
“While RoboForm’s passwords appear to be randomly generated, they’re not,” Grand said.
“With the older versions of this software, if we can control the time, we can control the password.”
So, with that knowledge he was able to effectively take the program back in time to 2013 and then set up a few other parameters, such as password length and how many upper or lower case letters, to create a relatively short list of possible passwords.
After tinkering around with the dates and parameters, Grand eventually hit on the right one and was able generate the same password.
“We ultimately got lucky that our parameters and time range was right. If either of those were wrong, we would have … continued to take guesses/shots in the dark,” Grand told Wired.
He’s not the first person to lock himself out of his crypto wallet
Believe it or not, people losing access to their Bitcoin or crypto fortunes happens more often than you might think.
Swiss businessman Stefan Thomas has just two attempts left to correctly guess his password and recover his $777 million Bitcoin fortune.
Much like the unnamed man in the story above, Thomas has forgotten his password and has so far made eight guesses, none of which have been correct, meaning his chances at gaining access to the fortune are dwindling.
Over in the UK, an IT worker called James Howells accidentally threw away a hard drive that had his access keys stored on it and has been locked out of his $785 million Bitcoin wallet ever since.
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With a background in both local and national press in the UK, Claire moved to New Zealand before joining the editorial team at Supercar Blondie in May 2024. As a Senior Content Writer working on New Zealand Standard Time (NZST), Claire was the first writer on the team to make the site’s output a slick 24/7 operation covering the latest in automotive news.
