How to recover the password of a cryptocurrency wallet

Several recent cases related to the crypto world triggered the global alert and highlighted two security issues that until now no one had taken into account: what to do if one loses the password of the wallet where the cryptocurrencies are stored.

The most notorious case was that of an American programmer who forgot the password to access his wallet with $ 240 million in bitcoin. The other happened after the death of an English tycoon and now nobody knows how to enter his account to get the 2 billion dollars that he owned in cryptocurrencies.

“Forgetting your password or not remembering where it was savedit’s more common than you think. This usually happens because one tends to believe that he will remember it. The best thing in these cases is to have an app that serves the sole purpose of saving passwords, ”said Patricio Poplavsky, CEO and founder of Poplavsky International Law Offices, a law firm specialized in different branches of law.

When something like this happens, the first thing to try is to retrieve it from the same application to the email address that the user previously entered.

The first thing is to try to recover them from the application itself. Photo Maxi Failla.

“There are others that take security to the extreme and do not even allow such a possibility, since there is no salvageable record within the servers of the company that made the application,” warns Poplavsky.

Faced with such a situation, the first thing to do is communicate with the company, which should validate the data of the owner to send a new password and be able to enter the app in question.

“It should be noted that we always have the possibility to communicate directly with the company and initiate an extrajudicial or judicial claim, if a positive response to said request is not found,” said Poplavsky.

You also have to be very careful when trying to test different passwords to see if one is correct as it runs. the risk of blocking the account and the number of attempts depends on each app.

If you enter the wrong password, you can block the account. AFP photo

“There are those that do not directly block the account, regardless of the attempts, up to which you can configure by the user the number of attempts until a crash occurs ”, specified Poplavsky.

Legal actions

For any lawyer, always initiate legal action should be considered as a last resort before the refusal or reluctance of the company, as long as the user can respect the previously agreed terms and conditions.

In the event of the owner’s death, it will be his direct heirs who can claim within the framework of a succession for such rights of the deceased.

“The first will be report the existence of such assets, and above all, individualize and provide the greatest amount of data (virtual wallets, passwords) in the process to facilitate the task of judges and operators of our justice that still remain very oblivious to this type of situation ”, warned Poplavsky.

For the moment and due to the few cases that came to light, the companies were willing to collaborate with the victims.

“These are exceptional situations and they it is not convenient for them to have a bad reputation or that rumors of dangerousness are generated in this microsystem ”, specified the legal expert.

But the truth is that in the decentralized system that these cryptoactives propose there is always a Achilles heel, so it is necessary to be rigorously cautious when operating and thus be able to protect the assets obtained.

SL