How to recover crypto lost in hacks? Find out more about the softwares that can save your crypto.
Key Points:
The rapid growth of digital currencies has also led to an increase in scams and accidental transactions.
Billions of dollars are lost to crypto scams yearly, with most people never recovering their funds.
Crypto recovery tools can help recover lost or stolen cryptocurrency.
The immutable nature of cryptocurrency transactions is bittersweet. On the one hand, it's one of their greatest strengths as it prevents the manipulation of historical transaction data. On the other hand, it means that a transaction made by mistake or by hackers can result in your crypto disappearing forever. Fortunately, for anyone who has sent crypto to the wrong address or been the victim of a scam, there’s a growing number of crypto recovery tools that can get your funds back into your wallet.
What Is a Crypto Recovery Tool?
A crypto recovery tool is a specialized service or technology designed to assist individuals and institutions in retrieving their inaccessible or stolen cryptocurrency assets. Considering over $600 million were lost to crypto scams, hacks, and rug pulls in the first half of 2023, it's clear there’s a big market for crypto recovery tools.
There are several different ways to recover crypto, but most tools tend to use one or a combination of the following methods:
Scanning Blockchains: A popular recovery system involves scanning a public blockchain for transactions that match your wallet address or seed phrase.
Contacting CEXs: If you have sufficient evidence of a fraudulent transaction or mistake, a CEX may help you receive funds, and some crypto recovery firms offer paid services for this type of recovery as an individual might struggle to force the exchange’s hand.
Cracking Passwords: Some recovery tools try to combine as many versions as possible of potential passwords and seed phrases to get their clients access to lost crypto. This is time-consuming, controversial, and very difficult if you’re starting from scratch.
Most crypto recovery tools rely on the first method and the second method, while some others have begun to employ more novel systems that use blockchain-based law, often referred to as Law 3.
Top Crypto Recovery Tools
The crypto recovery tools in this list approach crypto recovery from various angles. If you’ve lost your crypto or it's been stolen, you should consider which ones are most suitable to your needs and offer the best value.
Crypto Asset Recovery
Crypto Asset Recovery is a software company that offers a plethora of recovery services, ranging from password and seed phrase recovery to intricate scam tracing.
Their core focus is blockchain scanning, seed phrase recovery, and exchange assistance, but they also offer secure storage solutions for people who want to pre-empt potential scams and hacks.
Crypto Asset Recovery covers most large-cap cryptos, including $BTC, $ETH, $DOGE, and $LTC. According to their website, they can also help you retrieve lost or stolen NFTs.
Blockchain experts run the company, and it has a solid reputation; however, it’s an expensive service as it takes a 20% cut of all recovered funds, but 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
Jurat
Jurat approaches crypto recovery from a slightly different angle than traditional software solutions. The project’s core aim is to integrate legal rights onto the blockchain using a Bitcoin hard fork. The Jurat blockchain is integrated with courts across the United States that are linked to nodes; when a judge makes a ruling, Jurat blockchains can interpret and implement it, ensuring that the judge's directives are executed on-chain.
The tool used by the Jurat on-chain legal system is known as on-chain enforcement, and it has already been used by the US courts. Last week, a US district court used Jurat to lock Russian and North Korean hackers out of accounts they allegedly used to hold stolen crypto.
There has been some pushback against Jurat from crypto-purists who argue that any form of on-chain regulation goes against the core principles of the technology. However, the team behind the project argues that by offering the capability to return stolen assets, Jurat is a significant deterrent for potential cyber criminals and is necessary for widespread crypto adoption, as many institutions and individuals aren’t prepared to run the risk of irretrievable losses.
M2 Recovery
M2 Recovery offers standard blockchain analysis, password recovery, and exchange assistance features. However, the legal side of this research tool is what makes it interesting. M2 offers clients before-the-event legal expenses insurance for crypto asset recovery. The policy requires clients to prove their ownership of the underlying crypto and operates on a similar basis to standard insurance schemes.
M2 Recovery is arguably a pre-recovery tool. Just like in real life, we expect our bank deposits to be protected or our car to be repaired following a crash. M2 can protect your crypto from future hacks or mistakes. However, as you can imagine, M2 Recovery insurance isn’t cheap, and therefore, it's a tool generally used by people who hold large amounts of crypto.
CNC Intelligence
CNC intelligence is a cryptocurrency tracking and recovery service. They’re a team of blockchain analysis experts that hunt for people’s crypto after it has been stolen and moved across various chains and wallets. The public nature of blockchains makes everything traceable, but it isn’t easy, which is why a crypto recovery tool like CNC Intelligence can be extremely useful.
Their team uses various software tools and their experience to track down lost and stolen crypto. Once they identify the location of your crypto, they offer on-chain asset recovery support and legal assistance. Once again, the service is expensive, but CNC has built a solid reputation over the years and recovered countless people’s crypto savings.
How to Recover Lost Crypto?
Billions of dollars have been lost to crypto scams, and rug pulls. We can assume that as crypto adoption increases, so will the number of hackers and scammers looking to get their hands on people's earned digital assets. Crypto recovery tools provide a solution to an issue that damages the crypto community’s members and tarnishes the reputation of the industry as a whole. Companies such as Crypto Recovery Asset use tried and tested tools to recover lost crypto, while Jurat and M2 are trying to bring law to the often lawless world of blockchains.
