The barcode challenge

A race against time

A few days ago I've seen a post from /u/end_pun_violenceon in /r/qrcode titled:

$80 Bounty to Decode Partial QR Code to Help Pay Medical Bills

The post is alread removed, so I can't tell you the exact content. But the user pretty much asked Reddit if anyone can recover their $800 BTC wallet in exchange for $80.

The post contained a picture that according to the user was taken a long of time ago, and contained a barcode with the wallet's private key. The user made sure to censor parts of the texts that they believed are required to recover the wallet.

Because the wallet was already drained it's safe to post the picture, which is the following one:

Once I've seen the image, I knew this user is fucked. I knew in my heart that by combining the partial barcode and the partial visible private key someone can drain this wallet.

I started trying my best to recover their money. So first, I just asked my favorite AI agent to try whatever they want to recover that. I even gave them the exact chars from the private key to prevent a wasted time for fighting OCR services.

No matter what my agent tried, it couldn't recover the address. The barcode was not scannable, and we couldn't recover enough of the private key's chars to bruteforce it. It was pretty late at night so I decided to try again in the morning. I hoped the task is too hard and no one will drain it before I wake up.

Trying even harder. This time with a manual work.

At the morning I decided about a different approach. I asked my agent to develop a simple website that allows me to draw the QR manually in hope that it'll give us higher accuracy. So the agent built this thing:

This page allowed me to draw manually over the QR and fix it. So I had pretty much to read the QR manually instead of using a QR scanner.

It was one of the most annoying things I've ever done but after about 2 hours I've finished redrawing the QR code.

Now I provided my agent with the results and asked it to try its best to decode it. Realistically, we couldn't scan it because we needed at least 70% of the QR to recover the rest. And we had about 65% even after my redraw.

But because part of the private key was visible in the picture, we could "bruteforce" the visible part against the barcode. This way we succesfully rebuilt the whole private key.

Being too late

Although we did succeed with recovering the private key. Once I checked the balance of the wallet I've seen that it was just emptied few hours before I got to it. And sadly nothing can be done to recover the user's funds.

The user later deleted their post, and posted another one:

Whatever Soulless Monster Drained my BTC Wallet that I needed for Medical Bills, I hope you're happy  
---
I recently found a photo of a paper wallet I made in 2015, just 0.01 BTC, $2.16 back then. I recently rediscovered the photo with the full length public key/address, but for the private key the QR code was half covered and the private key text was 2/3 covered.

I'm not into crypto and I assumed without the wallet addresss the private key would still be useless. I tried my best over the last couple of weeks but my friend told me that with AI these days someone could vibe code something and surely get the key for me.

This was such a relief because I have a medical bill that's overdue and about to cause me a lot of problems while I'm out of work. This was a godsend and I felt like I was finally being given a break

I made a post in this sub and was offering a 10% bounty if anyone could decode the key for me. After my post with photo (wallet address and QR code blocked out) was up for an hour on the QR code boards people warned me to take it down so I did. I had just assumed without the wallet location, or logging essentially, the private key would be useless on its own.

I DONT DO CRYPTO. I KNOW IM A FICKING IDIOT

I was desperately counting on this money to pay an overdue medical bill, and it was such a huge relief when my friend told me it should be easy to figure out with AI now.

I'm in histerical tears now and beating myself up for being such an idiot. I'm so screwed right now, my family is also all in bad financial situations. I've had so much health expenses the last few years. I've had 4 surgeries in 6 years and have an open heart surgery I need in the next few months. I can't deal with all of this stress.

I KNOW I'M AN IDIOT. I DON'T NEED YOU TO TELL ME HOW FUCKING RETARTED I AM. BUT I REALLY NEED THIS.

If you are reading this, please understand I've had a million health issues since 2020, starting with being in a warehouse collapse on the second floor for which my employer denied I was supposed to be there. I broke my humerus into 6 pieces and needed a metal rod drilled through the middle along with bone transplants.

Then I have had ongoing heart issues, I needed open heart surgery years ago and now I need to replace that valve again.

Last year I had a hernia which got twisted and block and required emergency surgery on full life support in which they removed anhige section of my GI tract. And I've just had ongoing issues since then,nall piling on to debt.

I'm so behind on bills of all types as it is and honestly keep drifting towards the thought of downing all of my opiates and benzos in one go. I can't deal with this anymore. I had one thing that was offerng me a bit of hope and now you've taken it from me.

I KNOW IM A NAIVE FUXKING IDIOT. But I BEG you return it to me. Take the 10% without the need to feel any guilt. My PayPal is danieljohncrist@gmail.com if somehow you have a change of heart.

I can't work. I can barely live. I need help just taking a shower. Please don't do this to me. If anyone else wants to chip in $5 or something or would be appreciated, but I'd really prefer the original thief understand the impact they made and decide to do the right thing.

Mods, I'm sorry if this is off topic, I just thought it was my best chance at getting the attention of the thief. The original post from a couple of hours ago is still there, just with the post body and photo removed.

No one commented and I believe the user never got their funds back. I'm sorry /u/end_pun_violenceon and I really hope that one day you'll look back and laugh at that.