We’ve had an enquiry from someone with 134 ETH stored on a Ledger Nano hardware wallet. Unfortunately it’s a long time since they used it and they couldn’t remember their PIN code… and they no longer had their seed words either. The current (January 2022) price of ETH is £2750 per coin, so their wallet contains ETH worth £368,500.
They tried to guess their PIN passcode to the Ledger but got it wrong 3 times. This caused the Ledger to automatically reset itself to factory settings which has erased the private keys from the Ledger device.
Is there any way of recovering the 134 ETH from the Ledger ? No.
There is nothing that can be done to restore the private keys to the hardware wallet as they no longer exist on the device. The only chance this person has of restoring their funds is if they somehow find (or remember) the seed words they used when they set the wallet up originally. Remembering the Ledger PIN code is now pointless.
Best Practice: It may sound obvious but if you’re storing crypto on a Ledger Nano you need to not only remember the seed words, you need to remember the PIN too. The problem here occurred because of time. Several years elapsed from the owner storing the ETH on their wallet and then trying to access it again, by which time, they’d misplaced the seed words and forgotten the device PIN.
Broken Ledger Nano: If you can’t access the crypto on your Ledger because of a fault on the device then we can help. Also if you partially lost your seed words we can help too. Please get in touch.
