Recovery specialists crack $1B crypto wallet... but find just $10

When a client named Rusty contacted crypto recovery specialist Chris Brooks in 2021, he said he and two others had won 5,000 Bitcoin in a court case, worth around $53 million at the time.They immediately set up a Zoom call to discuss the case. “There were three guys on the call, and one of them holds up a phone. It has like $53 million in a Bitcoin address,” says Brooks, founder and chief executive of Crypto Asset Recovery.The men claimed they were able to withdraw as much as $300,000 a week but wanted to get the whole fortune out. If Brooks and his son, Charlie, flew to Georgia to help them crack the wallet, they would make them millionaires.Brooks and son bought plane tickets and went the next day. At lunch, Rusty, a 6-foot-3 Army veteran, revealed the wallet didn’t only contain 5000 BTC.“Rusty pulls out his phone, and he shows us a billion dollars in ETH. And that’s when I was like, okay, something very odd is going on here.”The men then drove about an hour to a strip mall owned by one of them, where they went into the back office and were handed notebooks containing dozens of recovery seeds. The pair spent the day opening wallets. They found about $10 in Bitcoin.Brooks never es...