I lost £129k in crypto when I forgot my ID… but hackers helped me get it BACK

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A BITCOIN trad­er claims she enlist­ed the help of hack­ers to recov­er £129,000 worth of cryp­to off her old com­put­er after she for­get her wal­let ID.

Rhon­da Kam­pert, from Illi­nois, was grant­ed the stroke of luck last year and claims she now has assets worth £31,000 each.

Rhonda Kampert helped pay for her daughter's college after recovering the lost Bitcoin

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Rhon­da Kam­pert helped pay for her daugh­ter’s col­lege after recov­er­ing the lost Bit­coinCred­it: BBC
The mother's heroes were crypto treasure hunters Charlie and Chris Brooks

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The moth­er’s heroes were cryp­to trea­sure hunters Char­lie and Chris BrooksCred­it: BBC

The moth­er first dipped her toe invest­ing back in 2013 when cryp­to was con­sid­ered an unknown quantity. 

At the time Bit­coin was worth £60 each and Rhona decid­ed that it might be worth a punt.

“I used to lis­ten to a radio talk show and they start­ed talk­ing about cryp­to and Bit­coin so I got inter­est­ed,” she told the BBC.

“Back then buy­ing it was so com­pli­cat­ed but I fum­bled my way through the process and bought my coins.”

Rhon­da said she end­ed up spend­ing some of her dig­i­tal mon­ey over the next 12 months and soon for­get about it.

But in 2017, as Bit­coin start­ed to rise in val­ue, she remem­bered her pur­chase and quick­ly logged back into her own device.

How­ev­er, she soon dis­cov­ered that she was miss­ing some of the login details as the “awful” real­i­ty of her lost for­tune set in.

“I realised 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,” Rhon­da said.

“It was awful. I tried every­thing for months but it was hope­less. So I kind of gave up.”

FORGOTTEN TREASURE

Come 2021, the prices of Bit­coin soared above £36,000 and it seemed like there would be no hope of get­ting her lost invest­ment back.

But with fresh deter­mi­na­tion, Rhona began surf­ing the inter­net for solu­tions and stum­bled across father and son cryp­to duo Chris and Char­lie Brooks.

“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,” she explained.

“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!”

What is Bitcoin?

BITCOIN got you baf­fled? Here’s what you need to know:

  • Bit­coin is a vir­tu­al currency
  • It’s trad­ed between peo­ple with­out the help of a bank
  • Every trans­ac­tion is record­ed in a pub­lic ledger, or “blockchain”
  • Bit­coin is cre­at­ed by mining
  • Min­ing involves solv­ing dif­fi­cult maths prob­lems using com­put­er processors
  • Bit­coin can be trad­ed anony­mous­ly, which can make it a pop­u­lar way of fund­ing ille­gal activities
  • The val­ue of Bit­coin fluc­tu­ates wildly
  • Bit­coin is one of many dif­fer­ent cryp­tocur­ren­cies, but by far the most popular

Rhon­da dis­cov­ered a wal­let of three-and-a-half Bit­coin which was worth £129,000.

She decid­ed to gift her new heroes a cut of 20 per­cent and used a fur­ther £7,000 to help her daugh­ter through college.

Rhona says she has since learnt from her mis­take and has decid­ed to keep the rest of her Bit­coin secure­ly locked in a hard­ware wal­let – with the login pin close at hand.

Now she hopes the coins will soar in val­ue again and enable her to cre­ate a retire­ment fund.

She added her main moti­va­tion is to quit her day job as a trad­er in stocks and cryptocurrencies. 

The risks of buying with cryptocurrencies

Invest­ing and mak­ing a pur­chase in cryp­tocur­ren­cies such as Bit­coin is risky:

Their val­ue is high­ly volatile and City watch­dog the Finan­cial Con­duct Author­i­ty has warned investors should be pre­pared to lose all their money.

Invest­ing in cryp­tocur­ren­cies is not a guar­an­teed way to make money.

You should also think care­ful­ly about mak­ing pur­chas­es with a cryptocurrency.

For exam­ple, Bit­coin has had wild price fluc­tu­a­tions in recent months and the price can change on an almost hourly basis.

The price of a Bit­coin was at $40,258 on Jan­u­ary 9, accord­ing to Coin­desk, but fell to $34,214 just three days later.

That’s a 15% drop.

These price swings are risky for a busi­ness as you could sell an item for a Bit­coin at one price and the val­ue may drop soon after, leav­ing you with less mon­ey from a sale.

Sim­i­lar­ly, the price of Bit­coin has soared by more than 21% since the start of this week so it can be hard for a shop­per to get an accu­rate idea of the price of an item if its val­ue changes on a dai­ly basis.

While Rhona has learnt from learnt from her invest­ments, oth­ers have been less fortunate.

One trad­er revealed he woke up to find he had lost near­ly $500,000 on a cryp­tocur­ren­cy scam.

And anoth­er said he has claimed he con­vinced his aunt to invest £150,000 in Shi­ba Inu cryp­to — only for her lose tens of thou­sands of dol­lars in 24 hours.

Buy­ing any cryp­tocur­ren­cy is incred­i­bly risky.

With any invest­ment, there is a risk that the val­ue of your mon­ey could go down as well as up. That means you should only invest mon­ey you can afford to lose.

Cryp­to can be riski­er than oth­er invest­ments because they are volatile and spec­u­la­tive — their price often ris­ing and falls very quick­ly, some­times seem­ing­ly for not reason.



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