‘Hackers helped me find my lost Bitcoin fortune’
Rhonda Kampert was an early adopter.
She bought six Bitcoins in 2013, when they cost about $80 (£60) each, and were the chatter of niche corners of the internet.
“I used to listen to a radio talk show and they started talking about crypto and Bitcoin so I got interested,” she says.
“Back then buying it was so complicated but I fumbled my way through the process and bought my coins.”
Rhonda, who lives in the US state of Illinois, spent some of her digital money over the next year or so, then forgot about it.
But when she saw headlines late in 2017 announcing that the value of Bitcoin had risen to nearly $20,000 she excitedly went to her computer to log in and cash out.
‘It was awful’
Except there was a problem. She was missing some of the login details for her Bitcoin wallet – a computer program or device that stores a set of secret numbers, or private keys.
“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 says.
“It was awful. I tried everything for months but it was hopeless. So I kind of gave up.”
Fast forward to last spring and the value of Bitcoin soared above $50,000 – more than 600 times what Rhonda had paid eight years earlier.
Filled with a renewed determination to find her coins, she hit the internet and came across father and son crypto treasure hunters 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 says.
“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!”
Rhonda’s wallet of three-and-a-half Bitcoin was at that point worth $175,000.
“I gave Chris and Charlie their 20%, then the first thing I did was take out $10,000 worth of my coins to help my daughter Megan through college.”
She says she’s keeping the rest locked away in a hardware wallet – a…
