Guide — honest about the odds
Recovering a lost or forgotten wallet
Some of what people think is lost is simply misconfigured, and recovering it takes twenty minutes. Some of it is genuinely gone forever. This page tells you which situation you are in, and what to try in each.
- Phrase The only thing that actually matters
- 4 Common causes of a false zero balance
- 0 Legitimate ways to recover a lost phrase
- Never Pay a recovery service upfront
On this page
Triage: which situation are you in?
Before trying anything, work out which of four situations applies, because the answers are completely different and two of them are genuinely good news.
You have the recovery phrase. You are fine. The device is irrelevant. Skip to the next section.
The phrase restores but the balance shows zero. Very likely a configuration mismatch rather than a loss, and usually fixable in twenty minutes. This is the most common panic and the most often resolved.
You have working access to the wallet but have lost the phrase. Recoverable, urgently, but only while access lasts. Act today.
You have neither access nor the phrase. This is the situation where we have to be honest with you, and we will be, in its own section below.
You have the phrase — restoring properly
The single most reassuring fact about self-custody: your coins were never on the device. They were always recorded on the blockchain, and the device only ever held the key that proves they are yours. A dead, lost, stolen or destroyed device is an inconvenience of about a hundred dollars.
Because nearly all non-custodial wallets implement the same BIP39 standard, you also do not need the same brand. A Ledger phrase restores in a Trezor. A Trezor phrase restores in a BitBox, or in free desktop software, or in a phone app. That portability is not a minor convenience — it means your access does not depend on any company continuing to exist.
Do it in this order. Get a replacement device from the manufacturer or an authorised reseller — in New Zealand that means GROOV in Christchurch, The Bitcoin Shop in Tauranga, or PB Tech and Mighty Ape for Ledger entry models. Never second-hand, and never from a marketplace. Run the recovery flow and enter your phrase. Confirm the balances and addresses match what you expect.
One judgment call: if the old device was lost or stolen rather than simply broken, consider whether the phrase itself might be compromised. A device protected by a PIN is not trivially readable, but if the written phrase was in the same bag, generate a completely new wallet on the replacement and move the funds across as a transaction rather than restoring the old seed.
The phrase works but the balance is zero
This is genuinely alarming and it is usually not what it appears to be. Four causes, in order of likelihood.
Derivation path mismatch. A recovery phrase is a seed; the wallet derives actual keys from it along a numbered path. Different wallets historically used different default paths, so a phrase from an older wallet restored in a modern one can derive an entirely different, empty set of addresses. The phrase is correct and the wallet is looking in the wrong place. Most desktop wallets — Electrum and Sparrow among them — let you specify the path manually, and trying the common alternatives usually finds the funds.
Wrong address type. Bitcoin has several address formats: legacy starting with 1, script starting with 3, native segwit starting bc1q, taproot starting bc1p. Some wallets scan only one type by default. If your funds are in a legacy address and the wallet is looking at segwit, you see zero. Check for an option to scan other account types.
Wrong network for tokens. If you are looking for a token rather than a
chain's native asset, the wallet has to be watching the right chain. An
0x address is valid on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Polygon and BNB Chain
simultaneously — the funds may be sitting on a network your wallet has not been told
about. Add the network and look again.
The passphrase. If you ever enabled a BIP39 passphrase, the phrase alone opens a completely different wallet from the phrase plus the passphrase. Both are valid wallets; only one has your funds. This catches people who set a passphrase years ago, used the wallet for a while, and genuinely forgot they had done it. Try the passphrase you would have chosen — and note that capitalisation and spacing matter exactly.
Check the address, not the balance
Before troubleshooting anything, find an address you know received funds and look it up on a public block explorer. If the explorer shows a balance at that address, the funds exist and this is entirely a wallet-configuration problem. If the explorer shows zero and an outgoing transaction you did not make, that is a different and worse situation — see our drains guide.
You have the device but not the phrase
This is urgent rather than hopeless. Your funds are accessible right now, and they are one broken device away from being permanently inaccessible.
Do not try to extract or view the existing phrase — most hardware wallets deliberately will not show it again after setup, and a software wallet that will show it is a wallet you should be moving away from anyway.
Instead: set up a brand new wallet with a brand new recovery phrase. Write that phrase down by hand, make a second copy, put the copies in two different buildings, and wipe and restore the new wallet to prove the backup works. Only then move your funds across as an ordinary transaction. Send a small test amount first.
Note that this is a transfer between wallets you control, so it is not a disposal for New Zealand tax purposes and generates no taxable income. Record it anyway — the date, the amounts, both addresses and the network fee — because you may later need to demonstrate it was internal rather than a sale. See our tax guide. General information, not tax advice.
Do this today. Not this month. The window is exactly as long as the device keeps working.
You have neither
We are not going to soften this, because false hope in this situation costs people more money through recovery scams than the original loss.
If you have lost access to the wallet and you do not have the recovery phrase, the funds are gone. Not frozen, not disputed, not in a queue somewhere — permanently inaccessible. Nobody has a backup copy of your key, because nobody ever had it: your own device generated it. The wallet's developers cannot help. The manufacturer cannot help. The Financial Markets Authority does not supervise self-custody wallets and has no mechanism to intervene. There is no dispute resolution scheme, no compensation fund and no insurer.
A private key of this size cannot be brute-forced. That is not a matter of insufficient computing power today; the numbers involved make it infeasible in any meaningful sense.
The only thing worth doing is a genuinely thorough physical and digital search, covered below, and then acceptance. And if this has happened to you, please take one lesson from it into whatever you hold next: two written copies, in two buildings, tested by a wipe-and-restore before funding. That is the whole difference between this page being academic and being about you.
Hunting for an old wallet
Worth being systematic about, because people do find these.
Physical search. Old notebooks and diaries. Filing cabinets and document folders. The backs of drawers. Any safe. Books — people hide things in books. Sealed envelopes you cannot account for. If you moved house since, boxes that never got unpacked.
Old devices. Retired laptops and phones, external drives, USB sticks. Wallet files from the early 2010s were often stored as a file rather than a phrase, and may be protected by a password you might remember. Do not connect an old machine to the internet before you have looked; an outdated, unpatched computer being brought online is its own risk.
Email archives. Search for the names of exchanges and wallets you might have used, and for terms like "wallet", "backup" and "recovery". You may not find a key, but identifying which wallet software you used tells you what format to look for and which derivation path to try.
Check the address first. If your search turns up an address without a key, look it up on a block explorer. That tells you immediately whether there is anything there worth continuing to search for — and a surprising number of people discover the wallet was emptied years ago, which is disappointing and also ends the search.
Recovery scams
If you post publicly about a lost or stolen wallet, you will be approached. Within minutes, sometimes. "Blockchain recovery specialists", "certified fund tracers", accounts replying to your message with a testimonial and a Telegram handle.
Essentially all of it is secondary fraud. On-chain transactions cannot be reversed by any private party — not by a specialist, not by a lawyer, not by anyone. A lost private key cannot be recovered by anyone who does not have it. The business model is an upfront fee, sometimes followed by requests for more, and occasionally a request for your recovery phrase "to verify the wallet", which converts a loss into a theft.
There is one narrow legitimate category: specialists who help recover a partially known phrase, or a forgotten password on an old encrypted wallet file. That is a genuinely different technical problem — constrained search rather than impossible search — and it does have real practitioners. If you are in that specific situation, verify credentials independently, never pay upfront, and never hand over a complete phrase.
Report attempts to Netsafe, and to police if money changed hands.
From our testing notes
Of the people we have talked to who thought they had lost a wallet, more than half had not — it was a derivation path, an address type, or a passphrase they had forgotten enabling. Which is genuinely encouraging, and also a reminder that a note recording which wallet software and which settings you used belongs alongside your seed phrase. Twenty-four words with no context is a much harder puzzle than twenty-four words with a sentence of explanation.
Frequently asked
Questions on this topic
What happens if I lose my crypto wallet?
If you have your recovery phrase, nothing — buy a new device or install the wallet again, choose restore, enter the phrase, and your balances reappear because the coins were never on the device. They were always on the blockchain. If you have lost both the device and the phrase, the funds are unrecoverable by anyone including the wallet's developers, because nobody else ever had the key. There is no reset process, no support escalation and no regulator who can help.
Can I recover a crypto wallet without the seed phrase?
Only if you still have working access to the wallet itself — in which case create a brand new wallet with a new phrase, write that one down properly, and move your funds to it immediately. If you have lost access and the phrase, then no. This is not a policy someone could change; the key is mathematically required and nobody else has a copy. Anyone claiming they can recover a wallet without the phrase, for a fee, is running a recovery scam.
How do I find an old crypto wallet from years ago?
Work through the physical and digital places methodically: old notebooks, filing cabinets, the back of drawers, safes, and any envelope you cannot remember sealing. Then old computers and phones, external drives, and old email for exchange or wallet confirmations that identify which service you used. If you find an address but no key, you can check the balance on a block explorer — which tells you whether the search is worth continuing, though not how to spend it.
I have the seed phrase but the balance shows zero. What now?
Usually a configuration mismatch rather than a loss. Check that you restored in a wallet supporting the same derivation path — this is the most common cause, particularly with older wallets. Check the correct account or address type, since Bitcoin has several formats and some wallets only scan one. Check the right network for token holdings. And check the passphrase, if you ever set one: a phrase with no passphrase opens a completely different wallet from the same phrase with one.
Are crypto recovery services legitimate?
Almost never. Anyone advertising recovery of a lost seed phrase, or reversal of a fraudulent transaction, is running a secondary scam targeting people who have just been victimised. Blockchain transactions cannot be reversed by any private party, and a private key cannot be brute-forced. The narrow legitimate exception is a specialist who helps recover a partially known phrase or a forgotten wallet-file password — a genuinely different technical problem, and one where you should verify credentials carefully and never pay upfront.
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