Most recovery companies won't tell you your odds before you've handed over money or files. That's backwards. The whole economics of an honest recovery service — ours charges nothing unless the recovery succeeds — depend on evaluating cases accurately before taking them. So here is the same scenario-by-scenario read we use on incoming cases, in plain language.
Two honest caveats first. These are qualitative tiers, not percentages — your specific case depends on details (how much you remember, what hardware was involved, what's been done to the files since). And a "poor odds" rating below doesn't mean hopeless; it means don't let anyone charge you an upfront fee against those odds. The evaluation costs nothing and settles the question for your actual case.
Usually recoverable
Locked out of a wallet like this one?
We repair hardware wallets, crack forgotten passwords, and rebuild broken seed phrases — on our own bench in Denver.
Forgotten password, with partial memory. If you remember fragments — words you used in that era, the structure ("pet name + year + symbol"), a base password you varied — the search space shrinks from "the universe" to something GPU brute force can walk through. This is the bread and butter of the field. The wallet format matters (some formats check passwords millions of times faster than others), but memory fragments matter more. See forgotten wallet password recovery.
A few missing or misordered seed words. A seed with one to three gaps — a smudged word, a transposed pair, words written in a doubtful order — is usually a constrained-search problem, especially when you know which positions are uncertain and have the wallet's first address to verify against. Details on the seed phrase recovery page.
Corrupt wallet file. Corruption sounds fatal but usually isn't: the private keys are small and often intact inside a file whose structure is damaged. Salvage tools, protobuf parsing, and raw key-carving recover most of these — the Bitcoin Core wallet.dat guide shows the escalation ladder. See corrupt wallet-file recovery.
Broken hardware wallet, PIN known, seed lost. A Trezor or Ledger that won't boot or display is a repair problem, not a cryptography problem — screens can be transplanted and connectors re-soldered, as in our Trezor touchscreen swap case study. See Trezor recovery & repair.
Old or obsolete wallet software. MultiBit, early Electrum, ancient wallet.dat files, defunct formats — the coins aren't gone, the software is. Someone who maintains the legacy tools and knows the old formats and derivation paths can almost always get keys out of an intact file.
Genuinely uncertain — worth an evaluation, honestly fifty-fifty territory
Password with weak clues. You remember how you made passwords generally, but nothing specific to this wallet. Whether this is feasible depends on how disciplined your habits were and how the wallet's encryption is built. This is exactly the case where an honest evaluation earns its keep — we sometimes decline these, and say so upfront.
Deleted wallet file on a spinning hard drive. If the drive kept spinning and writing afterward, it's a race between the filesystem and luck. Old drives that went into a drawer years ago do surprisingly well; system drives that stayed in daily use do poorly.
Missing several seed words. Beyond about three unknown words the search space grows brutally fast. What tips it back toward feasible: known positions, partial letters ("started with br—"), a known first address, or a candidate word list from the same notebook.
Passphrase-protected ("hidden") wallets. A forgotten BIP39 passphrase on a known seed is crackable the way passwords are — it lives or dies on your memory fragments.
Poor odds — be suspicious of anyone confident
Deleted files on an SSD. Modern SSDs erase deleted data in the background (TRIM) within minutes. Software undeletion mostly fails; anyone quoting high success rates on SSD undeletion is selling something.
Password with zero clues. A genuinely random, never-written-down password over ~10 characters is beyond brute force. We'll try cheap dictionary passes on a no-win-no-fee basis, but nobody honest promises results here.
Fully formatted, zeroed, or re-encrypted drives. If the sectors were actually overwritten, there is nothing to carve.
Impossible — and a scam signal if someone claims otherwise
Stolen coins already moved on-chain. Confirmed transactions cannot be reversed by anyone, ever. "Hackers" who claim they'll get your stolen crypto back are running the second scam on you. What can help: tracing for law enforcement, and acting fast when a thief hasn't yet emptied everything — see the next item.
— with one exception worth knowing: if your wallet was compromised but assets are still sitting in it (or locked in staking/vesting contracts a sweeper bot can't touch yet), a rapid rescue can sometimes beat the thief to them. Minutes matter. That's hacked wallet rescue, and it's the one theft scenario where calling a professional immediately changes the outcome.
"Wallets" that were never real. The 100,000-BTC wallet.dat someone sold you on a forum is a fake made to be sold, and no recovery service can extract coins that were never there.
Seed and access both fully gone. No seed, no PIN, device wiped or destroyed — the security model has no back door. Anyone who says otherwise for a fee is lying.
How to use this
- Find your scenario above and calibrate: if it's in the first two groups, your coins are probably not gone — proceed carefully and don't destroy evidence (no reinstalls, no experiments on the only copy of anything).
- Beware of confidence inversely proportional to odds. The scam-recovery industry quotes its highest success rates on exactly the impossible cases — our checklist for telling a legit recovery service from a scam is the antidote.
- Get the free evaluation. Describe what you have and what you remember — we'll tell you which tier you're in and whether your case is worth pursuing, before any contract or fee.