Fake or drained WIFs (paper wallets) don't bother

Hey everyone, I've created a few programs to help recover partial WIFs or seeds, and I often get messages from folks who say they have damaged paper wallets. Most of the time, it turns out they're not being truthful. I don't know where these images come from, but it's wild to see how this stuff keeps circulating and coming back to me, sometimes weeks or months later. Each time, someone insists their stash is legit, only to vanish when it turns out to be a dead end. They usually send the same 1-2 photos, so I can't even ask for different angles or anything. I've decided to share some of the paper wallets/images that people have sent me multiple times. Many of these have either been drained a long time ago or are outright fakes there's no way to verify their authenticity through successful recovery. Hopefully, this can help save others some time and cash. So, if someone shows you one of these addresses or tries to sell them, just know it’s not worth your effort.

Address emptied in 2016 Piece of paper used as a example(!) of damaged WIF on WIKI page about paper wallets: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet Some people still try to restore that WIF! 3 edited addresses which "looks like" bitaddress.org generated paper wallet. Restored private keys generates completely different addresses, of course all 3 are empty. That photo comes probably from seller from Russian forum. 3 edited pictures, situation similar to the one described above. I have no idea what was the idea behind that black/white edition, but at least I appreciate that it is something different than usual blurring

"Infamous" WIF 500, with a strange story behind. Partially burn diary with a hand-written WIF. Not sure if address is compressed or not. Subject of extensive collective search: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5404406.0 https://cracked.io/Thread-500-BTC-PRIVATE-KEY-WIF-LET-S-CRACK-IT Other data visible on the photo: That's interesting case because more than one single photo is available. Maybe there are still minimal chances it is real if some character(s) are misspelled.

575 BTC WIF (1HZNsUqQxKVLmfPfCAzLwrnVDzx8CxwxnM) That's interesting that treasure is always SO BIG, almost no-one comes with 0.05BTC damaged WIF, it is always a small fortune. Edited photo of a screen(!) and at the same moment hand-written key. Torn piece of paper etc. etc. Knowing public key it is easy to find knowing the range is so small, no result of course. And one more with the same approach, edited photo of a screen. At least 2 versions are circulating.

It is indeed very strange that stuff like that comes up so often but I guess Bitcoin does attract a lot of fortune hunters that are willing to pay with money or time if they think they can profit of things like this. So thanks for posting!

They have to be big otherwise the "victim" won't be fooled easily. This is one of the oldest methods of scamming newbies. It is either fake story to sell something like this (picture of the key/mnemonic or a wallet file supposedly containing a lot of bitcoin) to them and make money from their naivete. Or a malware embedded in the file they are giving away for free to infect the victim's computer and steal their coins instead. Nobody would bother with such things if there were $10 worth of bitcoin in it

I have seen similar services on a cracking forum where a certain address containing 50btc or more but dormant is sold without a private key and the buyer is expected to crack into the account by different means to get the money. Even, people fall for big offers with narrow retrieval process. This type of scam looks real and victims can easily be convinced to buy at a cheaper rate, without sitting back to think why this seller didn't retrieve the paper wallet himself is he not in need of the money? Just like people that sell a course that'll teach people to earn 10k dollars a week for $100, and greedy people rush to buy. The internet or cryptocurrency market don't favor the greedy people as they'll always fall for, buy 1 btc to get 10 btc, scam. Thank you for exposing these pictures, more are still in circulation you can update the thread too when you have other forged pictures to save members.

@PawGo Do we know the Bitcoin address of this damaged paper? If not, we can check it as we have a part of the address: In that case we would have '6DsQTUiH6' @LoyceV Maybe you can find the address?

The reason for sharing the data is of course so that anyone can download it and grep the data yourself. Anyway, no address containing "6DsQTUiH6" has ever been used.

Thanks a lot. (That was a fast service  ) So we know that this 'damaged paper' is fake or contains an unused WIF/address. Tell them, they don't need to restore it.

That one was a really nice try. Author prepared a nice print which looks really like a original paper wallet. Because bitaddress generates webpage to print, it is quite easy to replace the original content. Additionally recovery process was focused on partial QRcode, because to proof which WIF is printed it was needed to regenerate WIF taking into account visible part, which encodes WIF's ending and QR checksum.

I appreciate your effort to let people know there's people giving/selling fake WIF/paper wallet out there. Although i doubt creating list of all probable fake/scam WIF/paper wallet is worth it since scammer could just generate new one easily. My bet would be grey/dark market which can't be accessed with your usual browser/internet connection. I've seen people discussing certain .onion website which sell fake Electrum wallet (which only encrypt private key, seed, etc.), so it's not surpirsing if there's website for fake WIF/paper wallet.

Yes but you see the same fake wallet.dat files coming up for sale over and over, and these are more or less the same thing. Anyone with 5 minutes or so of time can create a fake paper wallet or wallet.dat or whatever, but that's work. Easier to scam the next bunch of newbies that come in with the same old thing. Even if you tell people it's a scam they still think they know better and will find a way to get the BTC. No different then the posts that still come up that they found a way to get private keys because they know math better then anyone and no matter what every cryptologist has said they are all wrong..... Since here in the US we had a drawing for a $1.9 billion dollar lottery yesterday, my business today..... -Dave

But people will at least see that it is a very common scam tactic and will not think they are lucky to be able to buy such a stupid scam paper, if they see that there are hundreds already posted freely on the web that were proven to be fake. Still I get your point since the prime target is for shure not a forum user but some noob on Reddit or somewhere.

@casinotester  @PawGo Can you post some of these prints? Want to check them.

@prutis is A SCAMER HE TAKES WALLET.DAT FROM WALLET PROVIDERS FOR VERIFY FAKE WALLET OR NOT, CASH OUT WALLET WITH BRUTE FORCE POOL WHAT HE ORGANIZED, AND AFTER NOT PAYY TO WALLET AND COMPUTE POWER PROVIDERS !!! HE CASH OUT 10000 BTC WALLET.DAT AND OTHER WALLET AND SCAM ALL PEOPLE, NOW HE MAKE ANOTHER CRACK POOL, AND DEFINITELY HE SCAM ALL PEOPLES AGAIN. DONT THRUST @PHRUTIS !! More info https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5500014.msg64216304#msg64216304

I can confirm this one is fake. True address and fake WIF.