Topic: How To Recover Crypto worth 78k$ from Stolen Phone (Read 560 times)

i have reported to police earlier as well but still no progress and life for me is turned to hl, i wasn't knew its can be that worst for me

Well, what can I say here besides sympathy about what happened, you just need to follow at least some security rules and store backups not on the main device.
Although the developers of bitcoin core also do not particularly care about the security of their funds, so Luke Dash jr. seems to have lost more than 200BTC that was stolen from his hot wallet on the computer from which he performed everyday tasks, and this after he himself reported hacking his server back on November 17, but did not take it seriously and here result.
 
https://twitter.com/LukeDashjr/status/1609613748364509184

That's true! I'm guilty of this myself (pretty important stuff backup-wise that I need to do 'tomorrow'). Nobody's perfect; just be aware of how risky (or not) your seed backup storage is and in which cases you're safe & which you're not.

Good point; in that case, @OP it means there is no way to recover your funds except recovering that phone itself. Sounds like there might be a chance. In case it's an Apple device, it should be trivial to track its current location, by the way. Other manufacturers like Samsung have similar technology for tracking and locking your devices.

  - I understand that feeling OP, it's a bit like you just made the mistake of putting a backup of important things on your cellphone.

It seems like a miracle that your phone is still recovering. But I hope that whoever got it still has the good heart to return it to you or contact you via the saved numbers in your mobile phone, although it is impossible for this to happen.

One possibility is that the phone was stolen by someone who knew exactly what was on it, which again would mean that it was a person close to the OP or someone to whom he was bragging about his gambling successes. OP should make a list of those who knew and try to find the possible culprit using the method of elimination.

In any case, it's stupid to give up, because someone must have seen something and knows something.

Probably deserves it's own post but a large part of things like this happening is 'tomorrow' As in "I have to take care of that, I should have some time tomorrow." And you don't get to it, and it's the next day and the next day and so on.

So you have a little to much in a hot wallet, you have to move it to cold storage. You take care of it tomorrow.....
You have funds on an exchange you want to pull them off, you are a little busy today no big deal you can take care of it tomorrow.....
Had one of your devices with the 2FA die, no big deal, just have to go get another cheap phone to throw on the authentication app, I'll pick one up tomorrow.....

Not what happened to the OP, but I can see this happening to any of us, even those who know better.
Have a hardware wallet, made a copy of the seed on a titanium plate and it's in a secure place. Good. Want to make a backup of it and put it in a vault. I'll take care of it tomorrow.....

-Dave

thinking of this and then ending with no possibility is pushing me badly toward ending. its make me think that i am so stupid but i wasnt knew about such thing can be happen

That's why mk4 is explaining you to use a hardware wallet and not a 2FA app. As you correctly understood, a 2FA app doesn't provide you any extra security if the thief has access to the whole device (so it's just 1 factor) anyway.

A lot of mistakes have been made, though:
1) Lots of funds on a centralized exchange
2) No second way to access your exchange and accounts (laptop??)
3) Too much money in a software wallet
4) No seed backups
5) No 2FA backup codes
6) No password on your phone
7) No synchronized password manager

Like, how is it possible that someone has access to all your accounts after you lose that thing?

I can't offer any solutions, but I believe this will allow you to learn from your mistakes.

@OP stated that the back up is on that same phone that was lost.  If @OP does not remember the seed phrases, I believe his coins is already lost.  The only  funds he can possibly recover is from the exchanges and gambling platform .

@OP I am sorry for the loss I hope we have learned our lesson in this incident.


If @OP KYC'ed on Binance, there is a huge chance that he can recover his fund in that exchange.  I believe it was locked 7 days after undergoing verification in order for @OP to change the security of his account.  Sadly his fund on stake had been ransacked.  It looks like his account is logged in on stake and the 2fa is on the same phone.  This is why I have my 2fa on the separate phone.

After all what happened, I think the only way to recover your other fund is to get the person who found your phone .  That is, if the fund on the wallet is still unmoved.


it is possible that police need some kind of support, an extra money perhaps to make them motivated in solving your case. 

If you have a backup made in addition to the one saved on your phone dude, I think you can still recover it even if your phone is stolen. But if you don't have a backup, it will be a bit difficult for you to recover it.

Now, if the person who got your phone changed the phone number in your email, it will be a bit difficult to recover, but if you have a recovery email in your email, you still have hope to recover your email for sure. I do hope you can recover it, due to 78K$ was a huge amount of money nowadays.

There is no obstacle to make a secure backup of your mobile crypto wallet and store it in a safe place. Although there are places where it is not wise to save a backup, and one of them is a personal computer. A hard disk failure can cause data loss, and a backup that is not encrypted can become an easy target, whether it is malware or unauthorized physical access to a personal computer.

Buying a hardware wallet is not something that should be considered the ultimate solution - because there are many traps you can fall into afterwards.

Storing this amount is risky and OP doesn't have any backups to his wallets as he says, so he failed to secure his wallets. Let alone purchasing a hardware wallet OP can backup seeds in his computer or anywhere. I don't know how people can be that careless. All that he can do now is move on and take the lesson for the future if this incident really happened to him.

I skipped your reply surely it was my bad, and he had a pin on it 1-8 of numbers. That is some wild thing to do. Maybe the thief knew about all the cryptos on OP's phone that's why instead of resetting the phone, he tried to unlock the phone and successfully did unlock and now taking everything from the phone. The guy who found the phone or stole it is very familiar with gambling and crypto.

its more then 2 weeks since i reported it to police and they are having no progress yet

You are overestimating all these types of protection, because all of that can be bypassed without the need to reset the device. I don't want to advertise anyone, so if you know how to use the search engine, you can find a lot of articles describing how to bypass each of these protections.

Besides, if the thief is someone who was close to the OP, he could very easily get a fingerprint, or find out what his PIN is - and sometimes a photo can also be used for face ID, I know this because I played with these things 10 years ago when this technology was not widely available.

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Have you thought about offering a reward for the one who would give the right information or for the one who would return the device? As a reason, you can state that the device contains some photos and videos that have great sentimental value for you. If the thief just wants to sell the device, he will certainly accept a better offer in the form of a reward.

I am not sure what you read, but it seems you didn't understand it properly.
I asked him what kind of protection he had on his phone in my first post in this thread, thinking similarly to you that there was none. It turns out that he had a PIN and it consisted of numbers 1-8 in a chronological sequence. The phone was assumedly lost at his place of work and probably found by someone who knew his PIN.

Storing that large sum in your mobile phone is quite risky --why not you did not purchase a hardware wallet that only costs $50 above in the official stores sounds more reliable than the mobile wallet. Keep in my mind that we always separate our funds with our daily personal use because that is prone to losing or hacking or it could be theft.

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For security purposes, they should.
You can patiently wait for the update when it will available to withdraw your fund.
Transfer to hardware wallet should it must so that you have your own private key.

Binance will release your account when they check your docs and find out that you are the account's original owner, so don't worry about it.
I read the whole thread and all the replies, and everyone missing a simple point: your phone doesn't have any password protection? Fingerprint, face id, or a simple pin!
It seems like you have lost a decent amount of money or you claim to lost it, and all that was in your phone, so you must have at least a fingerprint or pin on your phone. If your phone is locked with any security the thief needs to reset your phone and he would have lost all of your data, but you are accusing the guy who took your phone of having all the coins and accounts, and data you have.

Forgive me if I sound fishy about OP, It sounds like a huge loss for OP which he claims but I came from another thread of OP's where he claims something without any hard proof or explanation.
Here is the thread created by OP - https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/duckdiceio-fradulant-casino-ever-dead-support-center-5430960


A phone which holds 78k$ worth of crypto is not secured and does not have any backups of the seeds and wallets anywhere else! If anyone who can hold this amount of crypto on his phone can definitely know how to secure them or at least lock the phone well so that anyone who finds the phone has to reset the data to access the phone. 

police here dont know about crypto much and searching around cctvs getting no clues,  thats what police says. is making me sick and no one know how much i struggled to find my phone with such amount, asked a website if they can provide me withdrawls address and they told it was the previous adres which i used so i have no idea how many sites i used for gambling and where they made it to. police asked for time and support which i am providing and welling to support them to find my phone or a trace to the theif.

Giving up after only 10 days? Maybe this is what the thief was counting on, not only did you have so much money connected to your smartphone, but you also give up too quickly. I don't know in which country you live (and you don't need to reveal it), but considering the amount you mention here, the police should conduct a serious investigation, and you can't expect results in just 10 days.

Think about what exactly you were doing that day when you lost your phone, where exactly you were and, perhaps more importantly, who you told everything about how much cryptocurrency you keep in your smartphone. Maybe it's just that you lost your phone, and maybe someone stole it because you were bragging about things that shouldn't be public.

There are plenty of good posts and threads on this board that can teach you how to protect yourself in the crypto world and what mistakes not to make. But if the damage is already done, which is the case with you, no one here or anywhere else can change what has happened and revert the transactions involving the stolen coins. But you can get help to make better choices in the future and prevent things like this from happening again.

binance have locked my account for 7 days after confirming my identity.

Sorry for your loss brother --based on what I have read in previous comments it seems your account has no chance of recovering aside from asking request to freeze by the support and telling them the truth that your mobile phone has been stolen and now you want it to recover your lost fund and you are willing to pass any KYC procedure.
To all advice that I have read on a previous thread, only requesting the support to lock your account is the only way that you can protect your account while you are processing on recovering it. Binance is a centralized exchange that needs KYC, perhaps they will help you to recover your account by asking for your personal data.

i give up on everything, struggled more then 10 days and no result, a friend of mine was knew about this place and he told me there must be some ones who can advise you,
Anyway Thank you Every one.

Finding a device with an IMEI device can be done with the condition that you first complain to the authorities (police) to request a loss letter for the device used with some important data that is really needed.
Then the police will have the authority to carry out tracking with the help of cellular operators who will trace the last location of the cell phone.
But in fact, at this time, it is not easy to do this tracking, there will be several parties that must be involved and it is not that easy for operators to accept and track.
But the problem is, if the cellphone is stolen and the data is reset, the search effort will be in vain because the data must have been lost. There are many methods that can be done to reset data, especially on Android devices, and for iPhone devices, some iPhones with lower iOS versions will be easier to break into their security.

It's very sad when someone loses a device that contains a crypto wallet with thousands of dollars but no backup whatsoever.

It's hard to say something smart that could help, but situations like this only show us that people are incredibly irresponsible even when it comes to quite large amounts of money. As far as I know, every mobile phone can be tracked by unique IMEI, and if the case is reported to the police, then there should be some result.

Your best chance is for the police to do something, but the fact that you are not sure when and where you lost your device certainly makes their job more difficult - maybe you should still ask them if they can locate the device via IMEI. If you don't succeed, perhaps you can take solace in the fact that most gamblers lose everything sooner or later...

Some obvious mistakes have been made:

• Your mobile phone unlock PIN is 12345678? Seriously??
• You don't seem to have an offline backup of your mnemonic words of your Trustwallet wallet. If you loose those words, you loose your wallet permanently.
  If you saved a screenshot of the words or any other digital copy of them on your mobile phone, you can consider your wallet wiped, especially with such a stupid lock PIN.
• You put five figure amounts in a mobile phone wallet?? Maybe you have millions and a five figure amount is peanuts for you.
  I guess it's not, otherwise you wouldn't ask here... well, not the best argument.
  A mobile phone is not a very secure device, because it's easy to loose or get stolen as you now know by first hand, especially with a PIN that's in the top ten of worst choices. And your phone had basically no protection at all...
• You tied account recovery details (your phone number) to a device that you can easily loose or get stolen.

Sorry, that's not smart at all. Please, don't get me wrong, my point is not to blame or expose you, but rather emphasize for you and others what kind of various mistakes led to your likely permanent loss of (wiped) funds. All of this could've been prevented, more or less.

mentioned 300k as he said he cant belive i didnt set much security for 78k so wanted to tell him that i didnt set high security even that time which now made me regrit

You don't really have a choice if we are talking about Binance. All new users have to undergo KYC upon account registration. Those who have older accounts won't be able to trade use the exchange's features unless they undergo KYC. I am not sure if withdrawing works without it.

Generally speaking, yes. But his coins are already gone from Stake as he reported earlier.

You keep mentioning different sums every time. $78k, $130k, and now over $300k. The amounts don't really matter as it doesn't make the recovery easier/harder depending on the total loss.

it was more then $300k plus then i sold some and lost 50k around at duckdice.io, i never used any offline wallet before, and 2fa was in the phone for sure the guy who stole it know how to use it thats why my balnce from difrent platforms withdrawn.

In summary:

   - Your funds on Binance and Stake (or any centralized custodial platform) are salvageable
   - Your funds on TrustWallet is gone because you didn't have the backup


^ Make this an expensive lesson to not take your security for granted. How someone with $78k just uses a software wallet(and not a hardware wallet) boggles my mind.

Any loss of money is always unpleasant, especially when it comes to large sums, like OP's. It's sad to read stories like this, but it's a very good lesson for others. The main message of which can be voiced as, make backups and store them on different devices / locations, so that in case of loss, for example, a phone, you have alternative ways to access your funds. Learn from others' mistakes.

I hope OP will be able to get back his crypto currencies.

I hope your efforts will be successful and I think that's why it's important to use KYC so you can verify your real identity to apply for asset freeze on binance accounts due to loss of access of account data stored on stolen phones.

I have anticipated this risk for a long time even though I have not experienced this case, so I have prepared several steps to solve this problem:
- every email registered on the exchange must be linked for recovery to the primary email.
- never save and login your main e-mail on a phone or PC browser if it is not necessary, make sure you can remember the password because all other e-mail accounts can be recovered using the main e-mail.
- must save important files on an external hard drive, including code phrases, seeds, google authenticator codes, etc.

yeah contacted binance and stake, binance freezed acc for a week and since i have speak stake admin before, they recognized me and supported me financially as well.
but i learned this time very well.

It seems the best option that you have (like the above said) is to contact that gambling and exchange customer support and ask to freeze your account or investigate the login information if there is something like an IP address changed.

For now, there's nothing you can do but just try to recover your email address or accept the possible consequences of losing your fund which can't be recoverable if your fund is in theft hands.

Lesson to learn never leaves any valuable information in your phone.
Encrypt your phone with high security so that if it is stolen, theft can't open it.

pin was eassy 1 to 8, i was having more then 130k$ in total back in November i lost 390 xmr in gambling, i was badly depressed and everyone was knew it, lost phone on office but i was thinking that maybe its frank which never happened before, i was asking everyone if they have seen my phone around but i am not sure if it was inside office or i left it in the car and its stolen from my car, stake is empty now so theire is nothing to do with that.

That's good. At least the coins there are somewhat safe for now. But why only for 7 days, and what happens after that? 

Maybe you got infected with a keylogger or your PIN was easy to guess. How many people know about your interest in crypto and how much money you have?
How many people know your PIN, and how many people could have seen the PIN if you unlocked the phone in their presence?
Did you install any new software/games recently just before the hack?
Do you know where you lost your phone? Work, gym, public transport, home... You mentioned the office. So the phone was stolen from your place of work?   

Contact the other casinos as well and see if they can freeze the accounts for now similarly to what Binance did.

contacted binance they asked for my id card and passport they verified me and blocked account for 7 days they will let me know when i  will be able to move my funds, i have more then 5 gmail accpunt there and i was having pin on my phone but they find it maybe, reported to police they have searched every cctv on office and intarogated every single person that i was having doubt on. but still no clue, only from stake he withdrawn my funds. and i am just watching 😭😭

Have you connected your email address with a secondary email account maybe? Many email providers allow that. You might try to recover the email address of the account that was stolen through the connected email address if you set that up and if the second email account didn't get stolen as well.

If you are still using Binance that means you underwent KYC there, right? Contact them and ask if they can block your account or have it coupled with a different email and 2FA. They will have to verify your identity and make sure they are speaking with the correct person. Has your money already been withdrawn from Binance and the casinos you use? Do you have a way to check?

Trust Wallet is a non-custodial service. Anyone with access to the seed can move the coins from it. You can submit a ticket at https://support.trustwallet.com/en/support/home, but if the coins have already been withdrawn, it's too late already. You can report the crime to the police, and ask Binance what they need from you to help protect the crypto on your account (if it's still there).

I assume you didn't have a PIN, swipe pattern, fingerprint unlocking, or any other security measures set up on your phone and that's why the thief could access everything. You have lost a significant amount of money and did many things wrong, unfortunately. I hope you will find the time to learn how to improve and keep yourself safe.   

is there anyway i can speak to trustwallet or any guy who can help me recover my funds or to find location of my phone or the transections they made from my phone? i have contacted a website and they told me the user you talking about have made withdraw few hours ago, and they dont belive i am the real owner of the account. my phone number is removed of my email and email is replaced on that site as well.

If your seed phrase is on the phone and you do not have the backup anywhere else, that means you have lost your coin. Backup on phone is not safe and secure at all, the best way to backup is offline which can be on paper or steel sheet, in different locations.

You can still be able to recover your email to access your coins on the gambling sites and exchanges. But never leave your coins on exchanges, all you have to do is to just backup the wallet seed phrase offline in two or three different locations

i have few xmr on  binance  and some on gambling websites as i am gambling everyday, and most of my coins is on Trustwallet but the bad thing is that  the backup keys are in the phone.

You have your coin on an exchange or a centralized wallet? If you do not remember the password to the email and only your phone number can be used to recover your email, go to your service provider to retrieve your sim.

But having your coins on an exchange or centralized wallet means it is not your coin on blockchain and you have no full control over your own coins. Make use of noncustodial wallet instead and backup your seed phrase on a paper or steel sheet, having like three backups in different locations.

Hi, i lost my phone, and i can't recover my email as the theft have changed phone number which was associated to my email, with which i have created almost everywhere accounts and wallets, if there is any possible way please let me know.