Forged or empty WIFs (paper wallets) - do not waste your time

phrutis

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Quote from: casinotester0001 on August 30, 2022, 04:28:34 PM

6 months ago discovered the chapter "lost/damaged wallets/passwords/keys" in the Bitcoin world. Since then looking for stories, wallets, transactions that are connected with such addresses. So found also this address. But so far no clues whether it's a recovered wallet. I must say there are so many fantastic stories (but also lot of fake wallets, damaged keys). I hope that people who lost their keys can be able to get their coins one day.

Quote from: casinotester0001 on September 01, 2022, 02:32:44 PM

Quote from: casinotester0001 on August 30, 2022, 04:28:34 PM

Quote from: DaveF on August 30, 2022, 10:53:00 AM

Addresses and money like this move all the time, sometimes people are looking around for them and see them. Many times they do not.
The OP seems to be digging into and poking around old addresses for some reason. I think everyone who gets into BTC does that at some point in time.

6 months ago discovered the chapter "lost/damaged wallets/passwords/keys" in the Bitcoin world. Since then looking for stories, wallets, transactions that are connected with such addresses. So found also this address. But so far no clues whether it's a recovered wallet. I must say there are so many fantastic stories (but also lot of fake wallets, damaged keys). I hope that people who lost their keys can be able to get their coins one day.

One of the best stories is a guy who created lots of addresses, printed the screen output for each wallet on paper and stored them years ago. Then transferred over a long period BTC from exchanges to these addresses (The sum is huge). But he thought that a message plus the signature of this message can be used as private key and all of his prints on paper show exactly this. Instead of printing the WIFs, he made a cold wallet storage on paper of the signatures as he never saw a WIF private key before and thought that these are used to create signatures with the Bitcoin GUI. The good part of the story is: one day he will be able to calculate the private keys as each print shows several windows where also the txt window is visible with parts of the WIF. What I want to say: 'Your Keys, Your Coins' but understand exactly what private keys are, how they work and test it with small amounts (to an address and from that address to a new address) before you do it with large ones.

Maybe this 5000 BTC account was such a case, the owner was able to 'reconstruct' or 'calculate' his lost/destroyed private key.

@casinotester @PawGo
Can you post some of these prints? Want to check them.

hZti

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Magic

Quote from: ABCbits on November 08, 2022, 08:04:03 AM

I appreciate your effort to let people know there's people giving/selling fake WIF/paper wallet out there. Although i doubt creating list of all probable fake/scam WIF/paper wallet is worth it since scammer could just generate new one easily.

But people will at least see that it is a very common scam tactic and will not think they are lucky to be able to buy such a stupid scam paper, if they see that there are hundreds already posted freely on the web that were proven to be fake. Still I get your point since the prime target is for shure not a forum user but some noob on Reddit or somewhere.

DaveF

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Quote from: ABCbits on November 08, 2022, 08:04:03 AM

I appreciate your effort to let people know there's people giving/selling fake WIF/paper wallet out there. Although i doubt creating list of all probable fake/scam WIF/paper wallet is worth it since scammer could just generate new one easily.

Yes but you see the same fake wallet.dat files coming up for sale over and over, and these are more or less the same thing.

Anyone with 5 minutes or so of time can create a fake paper wallet or wallet.dat or whatever, but that's work. Easier to scam the next bunch of newbies that come in with the same old thing.

Even if you tell people it's a scam they still think they know better and will find a way to get the BTC.
No different then the posts that still come up that they found a way to get private keys because they know math better then anyone and no matter what every cryptologist has said they are all wrong.....

Since here in the US we had a drawing for a $1.9 billion dollar lottery yesterday, my business today.....

-Dave

ABCbits

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Crypto Swap Exchange

I appreciate your effort to let people know there's people giving/selling fake WIF/paper wallet out there. Although i doubt creating list of all probable fake/scam WIF/paper wallet is worth it since scammer could just generate new one easily.

Quote from: PawGo on November 07, 2022, 06:33:01 AM

In the most cases it is unfortunately not true - I do not know who is the source of that images, but it is surprising for me how that content is circulating and comes back to me (sometimes after several weeks/months).

My bet would be grey/dark market which can't be accessed with your usual browser/internet connection. I've seen people discussing certain .onion website which sell fake Electrum wallet (which only encrypt private key, seed, etc.), so it's not surpirsing if there's website for fake WIF/paper wallet.

PawGo

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Code:

L2dz4N9m5eKTobB6hmiiF7Dcz9W4TvJfCTBJUg1p6WT26pKVf81Y

That one was a really nice try. Author prepared a nice print which looks really like a original paper wallet. Because bitaddress generates webpage to print, it is quite easy to replace the original content.
Additionally recovery process was focused on partial QRcode, because to proof which WIF is printed it was needed to regenerate WIF taking into account visible part, which encodes WIF's ending and QR checksum.

casinotester0001

member

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'Bitcoin signature chain' & '1 pixel inscriptions'

Quote from: LoyceV on November 07, 2022, 04:03:42 PM

Anyway, no address containing "6DsQTUiH6" has ever been used.

Thanks a lot. (That was a fast service

)

So we know that this 'damaged paper' is fake or contains an unused WIF/address.

Quote from: PawGo on November 07, 2022, 06:33:16 AM

Some people still try to restore that WIF!

Tell them, they don't need to restore it.

LoyceV

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Thick-Skinned Gang Leader and Golden Feather 2021

Quote from: casinotester0001 on November 07, 2022, 03:39:41 PM

@LoyceV
Maybe you can find the address?

The reason for sharing the data is of course so that anyone can download it and grep the data yourself.
Anyway, no address containing "6DsQTUiH6" has ever been used.

casinotester0001

member

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'Bitcoin signature chain' & '1 pixel inscriptions'

Quote from: PawGo on November 07, 2022, 06:33:16 AM

Piece of paper used as a example(!) of damaged WIF on WIKI page about paper wallets: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet
Some people still try to restore that WIF!

@PawGo
Do we know the Bitcoin address of this damaged paper?

If not, we can check it as we have a part of the address:
In that case we would have '6DsQTUiH6'

@LoyceV
Maybe you can find the address?

Quote from: LoyceV on August 01, 2020, 05:05:46 AM

To follow up on List of all Bitcoin addresses with a balance and this post, I made a list of all Bitcoin addresses that have ever been used.

Accardo

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Leading Crypto Sports Betting & Casino Platform

I have seen similar services on a cracking forum where a certain address containing 50btc or more but dormant is sold without a private key and the buyer is expected to crack into the account by different means to get the money. Even, people fall for big offers with narrow retrieval process. This type of scam looks real and victims can easily be convinced to buy at a cheaper rate, without sitting back to think why this seller didn't retrieve the paper wallet himself is he not in need of the money? Just like people that sell a course that'll teach people to earn 10k dollars a week for $100, and greedy people rush to buy. The internet or cryptocurrency market don't favor the greedy people as they'll always fall for, buy 1 btc to get 10 btc, scam. Thank you for exposing these pictures, more are still in circulation you can update the thread too when you have other forged pictures to save members.

pooya87

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Quote from: PawGo on November 07, 2022, 06:33:44 AM

That's interesting that treasure is always SO BIG, almost no-one comes with 0.05BTC damaged WIF, it is always a small fortune.

They have to be big otherwise the "victim" won't be fooled easily.
This is one of the oldest methods of scamming newbies. It is either fake story to sell something like this (picture of the key/mnemonic or a wallet file supposedly containing a lot of bitcoin) to them and make money from their naivete. Or a malware embedded in the file they are giving away for free to infect the victim's computer and steal their coins instead.
Nobody would bother with such things if there were $10 worth of bitcoin in it

hZti

hero member

Activity: 938

Merit: 642

Magic

It is indeed very strange that stuff like that comes up so often but I guess Bitcoin does attract a lot of fortune hunters that are willing to pay with money or time if they think they can profit of things like this. So thanks for posting!

PawGo

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575 BTC WIF (1HZNsUqQxKVLmfPfCAzLwrnVDzx8CxwxnM)
That's interesting that treasure is always SO BIG, almost no-one comes with 0.05BTC damaged WIF, it is always a small fortune.

Edited photo of a screen(!) and at the same moment hand-written key. Torn piece of paper etc. etc. Knowing public key it is easy to find knowing the range is so small, no result of course.

And one more with the same approach, edited photo of a screen. At least 2 versions are circulating.

PawGo

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"Infamous" WIF 500, with a strange story behind. Partially burn diary with a hand-written WIF. Not sure if address is compressed or not. Subject of extensive collective search:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/find-the-wif-challenge-5404406
https://cracked.io/Thread-500-BTC-PRIVATE-KEY-WIF-LET-S-CRACK-IT

Other data visible on the photo:

Code:

column sea alone anchor escape amount apart coil between tail alley grow

L5ipgEL7qu5gCUffVGRhdf8YbZZETn5uFTqqHBJswc9GsCR81TQ9

That's interesting case because more than one single photo is available. Maybe there are still minimal chances it is real if some character(s) are misspelled.

PawGo

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Code:

5KHeDULuVSnMWdAq7aeaMeYZqTpifaNZ5WMS7uKFR8nsNuWGh1d
12LuCsCwqatF5pQMhqJg4MeAG5Lt6tqXmZ

Address emptied in 2016

Piece of paper used as a example(!) of damaged WIF on WIKI page about paper wallets: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet
Some people still try to restore that WIF!

3 edited addresses which "looks like" bitaddress.org generated paper wallet. Restored private keys generates completely different addresses, of course all 3 are empty. That photo comes probably from seller from Russian forum.

3 edited pictures, situation similar to the one described above. I have no idea what was the idea behind that black/white edition, but at least I appreciate that it is something different than usual blurring Cheesy

PawGo

legendary

Activity: 952

Merit: 1367

Hello,

Being author of few programs for restoring partial WIFs or seeds, I am often contacted by people who claim to be owners of damaged paper wallets. In the most cases it is unfortunately not true - I do not know who is the source of that images, but it is surprising for me how that content is circulating and comes back to me (sometimes after several weeks/months). Each time another person assures me about authenticity of treasure and disappear after it appears to be a waste of time. There are always 1-2 photos (always the same) so it is not possible to ask for another photo, with a different angle etc.
I have decided to publish some of paper wallets/images which were sent to me more than 2-3 times and which appeared to be emptied log time ago or are forged - their authenticity cannot be confirmed by successful restoration. Maybe it will save other's time (and money).
In other words: if someone shows you one of these addresses (or try to sell them to you), you know it is not worth to work on it.

(moderator: I try to send each case as a separate post, please do not merge)

Topic: Forged or empty WIFs (paper wallets) - do not waste your time (Read 348 times)