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CDR / Work we specialise in / Hardware wallet recovery

Specialist · Hardware wallet recovery

Hardware wallet recovery for Cardiff. The coins are on the blockchain; the device holding the keys failed.

Hardware wallets reach us from across Cardiff and South Wales: a Ledger that took a knock in a coat pocket, a Trezor whose socket has been levered once too often, a device found in a drawer long after a house move. The pattern is nearly always physical. Nothing has been hacked and nothing has been spent — a port has given way, water has crept in, or the words that would restore the whole thing are sitting on a computer nobody has switched on for years.

No files back, no fee on most jobs One fixed price, after a free diagnosis It comes to us by post from Barry, Pontypridd or Newport

Describe the symptoms to an engineer
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What each symptom is telling you.

Not listed here? Try the triage →
What shows upWhat has gone wrongDo this now
The wallet will not power up at allUsually the port or the board around it, not the chip holding your keysStop charging it; ring us
It has been through waterCorrosion is spreading across the board while it sits in a drawerDo not dry it out with heat
The USB socket has snapped offThe connector has torn from its pads; what is under it is untouchedNormally recoverable
The seed photo sits on a failing cardThat card is shedding sectors, and each read takes a little moreCopy it now, while it reads
The screen wants a PIN nobody can rememberWrong guesses run down a counter, and at the end the device wipesStop guessing, and ring us
A second-hand wallet came already set upSomebody else knows your recovery words and can empty itMove the coins off it today
Posting it to us: post it tracked and fully insured to the intake lab, and the journey back is on us; ring first if you would like an engineer to check how it is packed before you seal the box. Every stage is set out on the posting guide.

What is inside a hardware wallet, and what breaks it.

The secure elementYour private keys are made inside a small chip built to resist being read, and they never leave it. Everything the wallet does with them happens in there. That is its security, and also its boundary: a working chip hands its keys to nobody.
Ledger, Trezor, KeepKeySealed plastic shells with a small screen and a button or two. Some keep the keys in a dedicated secure chip, others behind an encrypted store on the main microcontroller. Ledger, Trezor, KeepKey, SafePal and BitBox02 differ in the detail, but on a bench each is a board, a port and a display.
Where the port gives wayWhere most of these jobs begin. The socket is the one part under load — plugged in, tugged sideways, leant on — and its pads lift long before anything else fails.
Water, drops and radiatorsThree things account for most of the damage. Water leaves salts behind that go on eating the board for weeks after it looks dry. A drop lands on whatever protrudes, which is the socket. And the heat used to dry a wallet out — a radiator, a hairdryer, an airing cupboard — warps the board and lifts its joints for good.

From the parcel to your files coming back.

Cases we have logged →
01

A case number, and a diagnosis at no cost Free

The diagnosis costs you nothing. Every item that arrives is logged under a case number of its own, and an engineer works out what has actually failed — then tells you plainly which files can come back and which cannot. The price follows that: one fixed figure, in writing, and no work begins until you have read it and said go ahead.

Diagnosis at no chargeOne fixed figure in writingNothing owed yet
02

Photographed first, then opened

Nothing is plugged in first. The wallet is photographed exactly as it arrived, the make, model and serial noted, and the shell opened on the bench under a microscope so the board can be read before any power reaches it.

Photographed as it arrivedThe actual fault, named
03

Anything with storage, copied

If a card, stick or drive came in alongside the wallet, it is imaged before anything else is attempted. Weak areas get short passes, with the awkward regions saved for the end, and your own media is never once written to — the copies take the wear instead.

Each one copied firstNothing written to yours
04

The board brought back up

A lifted pad is rebuilt, a snapped socket replaced, corrosion cleaned away under magnification, and the board powered on the bench. Where the fault was only ever mechanical, the wallet wakes as it was and your own PIN still opens it.

Connector rebuilt by handYour own PIN, entered by you
05

You approve it, then it goes back

Nothing is billed while you are still deciding. A complete listing of what came off the drive reaches you first, and the invoice only follows your yes. Files travel back on media bought new for the job, return postage ours, and we do not close it here until every one of them opens on the machine you will use.

The file list is yours to approveBack on media bought newThe postage back is on us

What we usually find first

  • The secure element is the point — the keys are made inside a chip built to resist being read, and they never come out of it. That keeps it safe from a thief, and it is the same reason nobody, ourselves included, lifts them off a working device.
  • The recovery seed is the real backup — those twelve or twenty-four words are the wallet. Given them, a replacement device restores everything in minutes and the broken one stops mattering. Written on paper and then lost, they cannot be worked back out of the device, and not out of us either.
  • Water and drops do the damage — a soaked wallet corrodes quietly in a drawer, and the heat used to dry it finishes the board off. A drop lands on whatever sticks out, which is the socket. Neither insult touches the keys themselves; both can stop you reaching them.
  • Second-hand and pre-configured is a fraud — a wallet that turns up already set up, or with the words filled in on a card in the box, was prepared by somebody who kept a copy. A known pattern, not bad luck. Move anything on it today and start again on one you initialise yourself.

What we can do here, and what nobody can: your coins are entries on a public ledger and they are not inside the plastic in your hand. The device holds the key that signs for them, so this is a hardware job — mend the connector, clean the corrosion, get the thing to boot, or find the recovery words wherever they were last written down. What we cannot do deserves saying just as plainly. We cannot reverse a transaction once it has gone out. We cannot follow coins that have been taken, and we cannot get money back from whoever took it; that is police work, not laboratory work. We will not open a wallet that is not yours, and we will ask you to show that it is. And we cannot conjure a seed phrase out of nothing: if the words were never typed, photographed or backed up, no disk on earth has them for us to find.

Straight out of the casebook.

CF · CDF-2026-0841LOGGED ✓

The recovery words on a laptop that had been wiped

A Ledger from a flat in Canton went through a wash cycle in a coat pocket and never woke again. The owner's only record of the twenty-four words was a photograph taken years earlier on a laptop that had since been reinstalled and passed to a nephew. That drive came in with the wallet. Every sector of it was copied, the deleted photograph carved out of free space, and the owner restored to a new device himself. Three days from arrival.

100% imaged3 days after arrival

Before you send it off.

Start with these

  • Send the wallet and anything the backup might be on
  • Tell us the make, the model and what happened to it
  • Leave a wet one off and unopened
  • Say whether you still have the words

What to avoid

  • Guessing at the PIN until it wipes itself
  • Drying a soaked wallet on a radiator
  • Typing your recovery words into a website
  • Sending us the words — we never need them

What we get asked, week in, week out.

My Ledger will not switch on. Have I lost the coins?

No. The coins sit on the blockchain and always have; the device holds the key that signs for them, nothing more. So there are two ways back. If the fault is mechanical — a broken socket, a lifted pad, water across the board — the wallet can often be mended, and your PIN opens it as it did before. If it cannot be mended, the recovery words put the same wallet onto a new one. Only when neither is available is the answer a hard no.

Someone took my crypto. Can you get it back for me?

No, and anyone who says otherwise is taking advantage of you. A transaction that has been broadcast cannot be reversed, by us or by anybody else. We cannot follow coins into another wallet, we cannot make an exchange hand them over, and we cannot claw back money sent to a fraudster. If you have been defrauded, report it to the police. Our work is narrower and physical: broken devices, and wallet files or recovery words still sitting on storage you own. If your case is not one of those, we will say so on the phone and charge you nothing.

I have lost my recovery words. Can they be worked out?

Not out of thin air, and not from the wallet — the whole design exists to stop exactly that. What can be tried is finding them where they were last kept. People photograph the card, type the words into a note, keep a screenshot, or write a text file and delete it months later. Cards, sticks and drives hold deleted files until the space gets used again. Send us the storage, say roughly when it was written, and we will look.

What should I send you, and where does the parcel go?

The wallet itself, and any card, stick or drive that might hold a backup or a photograph of the words. We cannot take phones or tablets, so if the picture is on a phone, copy it off first. A drive out of a laptop or PC travels bare; an external one may stay in its case. There is no collection service: post it tracked and fully insured to the lab in Bristol, or drop it in.

Pages people often read next.

Internal disks → Clicks and beeps → Nothing shows up → Devices we take in →

An unplugged drive keeps whatever it still holds.

A failing drive has only so many starts left in it. Spend none of them. Keep the power off, and the free diagnosis will tell you what is still readable.

0800 6890668

Get it checked Where to post it