The computer scientist Joe Grand, who is considered one of the most famous hardware hackers in the world, and has already saved several missing crypto assets from various hardware devices, was not surprised when he found only a fraction of a Bitcoin this time after a lot of effort.
As Grand shows in a recent YouTube video, he first traveled from Portland to Seattle to save “several million dollars” in Bitcoin (BTC) from a Samsung Galaxy SIII owned by coach driver Lavar Sanders. Sanders had bought the BTC in question in July 2016 “in a rather dubious way”, after which he then stored the crypto funds in a wallet on his smartphone.
In the meantime, the bus driver had already lost the device before he found it again in 2021, but without remembering the access data for the crypto wallet. For this reason, Sanders contacted Grand together with a friend, who often deals with similar cases in his YouTube videos.
The white hat hacker agreed to help and with considerable effort was able to restore access to the Samsung Galaxy SIII. However, when Sanders opened his MyCelium Bitcoin Wallet, disappointment followed, because there were only a measly 0.00300861 BTC left in it, which had the equivalent of 105 US dollars at the time of recording. At the time of writing, this sum is even worth only $ 63. As Grand was later able to find out, the bus driver had only bought Bitcoin for $ 400 in 2016, which was later sent to the mixing service BitBlender, which, however, ceased operations in 2019.
“I’m a little disappointed,” as Sanders admits in the face of this discovery. But at least he takes the defeat with humor: “We didn’t find any money, but we made new friends.“
