What's in MY "wallet"? No crypto, that's for sure.

When it comes to cryptocurrency, I'm squarely in the skeptics corner. I do believe that, with the world - make that the metaverse - increasingly going all digital, money is increasingly treated as a digital asset, more or less. And it will eventually be regulated by banks and governments - not by bitcoin wild-westerners. 

But a lot of folks are getting into it, mostly for speculative purposes, hoping that crypto alchemy will let them spin nothing into solid gold. (And don't get me going on the celebs getting in the act by touting crypto. Looking at you, Tom Brady, Matt Damon, Larry David, Reese Witherspoon, Kim Kardashian...)

While crypto madness rages on with all the on-raging of the South Sea Bubble and Tulip Mania, it's no surprise that adjacent businesses are spring up. One such business is crypto-hacking. This service is used by those who purchased crypto and have it stored in a "wallet." But unfortunately, they've lost the super-secret password that will get them into that "wallet" - which plenty of crypto holders want to do so that they can turn their crypto into some real money. (What's the opposite of "hard earned?") And unfortunately, the Dick Tracy decoder ring they inherited from their great-grandfather isn't doing them any darned good. 

(I actually don't know how the keys/passwords/authentication works with crypto, and I'm not interested enough to figure it out. Not sure if a private key gets generated when you buy in - some long, non-memorizable combo of letters and numbers and/or whether you set your own password (as in password1234). I'm pretty sure it's the former, but you might be able to set up two-factor authentication for yourself. Belt and suspenders!) 

Anyway, it's estimated that there may be $140.7 billion in funds "stranded" in wallets. (Given the crypto market volatility, that amount may be up or down on any given day.)

If you're the owner of part that over-under $140.7 billion, and you want it back, who you gonna call? 

You might give a holler to Chris and Charlie Brooks of Crypto Asset Recovery of Durham, New Hampshire.

Chris and Charlie are a father-son duo. Their involvement in crypto wallet cracking began in 2017:

Chris, 50, who previously ran a furnace comparison website and worked as a tech executive for a nursing home ratings platform in Wellesley, was intrigued by bitcoin, knowing he wanted to start a business around it. His first attempt at the password-hacking business fizzled. But a little over a year ago, as bitcoin values shot up, demand increased, prompting him to resurrect the venture.

This time, his son Charlie, 20, a self-described “tech nerd” wanted in, deciding to drop out of the University of Vermont, where he studied computer science.(Source: Boston Globe)

They've set up a division of labor. Chris, as befits a fellow with the imagination to have held senior positions at a furnace comparison website and a nursing home ratings platform, is in charge of sales and marketing. Charlie is in charge of the hacking. 

They get paid a percentage of the value of the crypto they recover. Their take for the first 10 bitcoin recovered is 20%. After that, a sliding scale kicks in. 

Sometimes - about 30% of the times - they win; sometimes they don't even break even.

It took them 20 minutes to help out a Chicago day trader hack into her wallet, where they recovered $150K worth of 6 bitcoin. Their cut wasn't bad. And it wasn't bad for the day trader either, who'd paid less than $500 for her bitcoin trove back in 2013. (Not that I would ever have done so, but despite my feelings about crypto, I'm kinda sorta wishing that I'd laid out $500 for some back in the day. Of course, I would no doubt have long misplaced the key to my wallet...)

They made a less successful attempt to recover what was variously estimated to be worth $44M (initial estimate) and - wait for it - $3.2B (later estimate).

Apparently, three men in Georgia — a strip-mall magnate, a farmer, and a former Navy SEAL — won the digital wallet in a bankruptcy case. But they had one big problem: They didn’t know the key code to unlock the funds. 

A strip-mall magnate, a farmer, and a former Navy SEAL walk into a bar...Oh? You've already heard this one?

This treasure hunt involved a trip to Savannah and 10 hours spent trying to crack the code. Which they did succeed in doing. Alas, it turned out that all that was in the wallet was worth $10. At 20%...

The Brooks-es chalked that one up to experience. 

“It’s the wild, wild West out there,” Chris Brooks said. “Crazy things do happen.”

Predictably, because it is the wild, wild West, there are plenty of scammers out there. Recovery companies, like the Brooks' outfit, need to make sure that their clients are on the up and up.

In tricky situations, such as when cryptocurrency wallets are at the center of a divorce proceeding or estate dealing, they work with their lawyer to determine whether the person wanting to hack into the wallet actually has ownership of it. 

Good luck to Chris and Charlie Brooks. After the thrill of bitcoin, I'm sure it would be tough to get back into the furnace comparison biz. 

But mostly all I can say is, it's one crazy world, and we just live in it.