Scams, forgotten passwords, and lost fortunes: Meet the digital locksmith who helps people get their bitcoin back
Forgetting your Instagram password is annoying. Forgetting your crypto wallet password could be devastating.
Crypto owners don't have the luxury of emailing themselves a password reset link if they're locked out of their self-custody wallet. It's an issue that's becoming bigger as bitcoin and other cryptos surge in price and crypto holders scramble to retrieve previously abandoned wallets.
For Julia Burlingham, who owns the business Professional Crypto Recovery, business is booming.
"When the price of bitcoin goes up, my phone rings all day," Burlingham told Business Insider.
Burlingham started her business five years ago, after helping her brother recover his dogecoin during the memecoin's heyday. According to Burlingham, she was able to unlock his wallet, where an initial $300 investment had grown to $6,000.
She's seen it all, from people who inherit locked crypto wallets to those who have misplaced their seed phrase. Here's what it's like inside the world of crypto recovery.
How does crypto storage work?
There are two main ways of holding crypto: on an exchange like Coinbase, or through self-custody using your own crypto wallet.
While self-custody provides more control and privacy, the responsibility of securing the wallet lies in — as the name implies — yourself. Setting up a self-custody wallet generates a seed phrase of 12 or 24 random words that encodes your private key.
People often write the seed phrase down with pen and paper, according to Jess Houlgrave, CEO at the digital asset startup Reown. Issues arise when that slip of paper isn't stored securely.
"As soon as you're in the self-custodial realm, you need to be able to store and recover your seed phrase in order to be able to use the assets," Houlgrave told Business Insider.
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She's also seen people store their passkeys on Google Drive or password managers, which Houlgrave doesn't recommend, as those methods are susceptible to being hacked.
Both Houlgrave and Burlingham mentioned that the LA wildfires earlier this year resulted in many people losing their seed phrases when their homes burned down.
Last year, Reuters reported that some wallet recovery services saw requests for their services more than triple when bitcoin rose to $70,000. Now, with bitcoin prices firmly in six-figure territory, the stakes are even higher.
A day in the life of a crypto locksmith
Burlingham helps people with issues such as forgotten passwords, partial seed phrases, corrupted wallet files, or old wallets that no longer sync with the blockchains.
Her clients range from original bitcoin investors who bought over a decade ago to people who just set up their accounts recently and suddenly lost access.
"Depending on the wallet, sometimes you can brute force it," Burlingham said.
It helps if you remember fragments of a password or seed phrase.
"I'll ask for password clues and how they typically make their passwords," Burlingham added.
Using specialized supercomputers with high GPU and CPU power, Burlingham runs password recovery tools that test millions of combinations. Because wallets and private keys are highly sensitive, she runs them on air-gapped computers, or machines that aren't connected to the internet.
Burlingham also helps those who have been scammed of their crypto, a growing problem. According to a report by Chainalysis, more than $2 billion was stolen from cryptocurrency services already in 2025, surpassing the total for all of 2024.
The recovery process can take months. One case that Burlingham started in November of last year took until this April to finish.
Recovering crypto is also an energy intensive endeavor.
"It's really high," Burlingham said of her electricity bill. "You have to have cooling systems because these machines produce a lot of heat."
Lost crypto
Unfortunately, sometimes, nothing can be done to recover the crypto. According to crypto wallet provider Ledger, it's estimated that between two and four million bitcoins are permanently lost.
James Howell is an infamous example of this unlucky outcome — the IT worker accidentally threw away a hard drive containing 8,000 bitcoins back in 2013.
In the case of crypto, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound — or several — of cure.
Make multiple copies of your seed phrase and putting them into secure physical locations, such as a locked safe or bank vault, Burlingham recommends. And it may sound simple, but avoiding phishing links and keeping your seed phrase private are steps that many people still overlook.
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