Please don’t buy fake wallet.dat files !

As you are aware you are able to password protect your bitcoin core wallet.dat file and if you do this no one can access your coins unless they know the password, this is very different from recovery phrases (or seeds) which are used to recreate entire wallets. N.B. bitcoin core does not support a recovery phrase.

Our company specializes in finding lost passwords from wallet.dat files but it can be a time consuming process, unless you know what you are doing :) Over the last 2 years we have received a large number of fake wallet.dat files that unsuspecting people have bought on the internet - they look like the real deal and amazingly the bitcoin core client opens up the wallet.dat file and displays the number of bitcoins it contains - alas it is a clever fake - it even shows ‘real’ transactions and you can check on the blockchain to see them - howeve the big difference between these fake wallets and real ones is that they do not contain any private keys - so even if you do find the password on the wallet (and we have successfully done this on most of them) - there are no private keys to dump/export. So in summary please do NOT waste your money on these bitcoin wallets - they are 100% fake and a total waste of money.

Most of these wallet.dat files have been created with a piece of software created by a clever chinese individual - see http://xingfeng.org

Here is a sample screen dump (in chinese) showing a bitcoin wallet displaying 150 btc !

The 4 most popular sites that these fake wallets are avaialble on are: 4shared (for free), allprivatekeys (at a cost), Wallet-Dat (at s cost) and CheapBitcoin

Here are two sample screens showing these fake wallets on 4shared and allprivatekeys: