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Man Recovers $400k Bitcoin Wallet After Claude Figures Out He Changed the Password to 'lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)'

A man who forgot the password to a Bitcoin wallet containing around $400,000 worth of cryptocurrency has finally regained access after an 11-year search, with the help of Claude AI. Over eight weeks, Claude analysed his old college computer and discovered a wallet backup that could be decrypted using a mnemonic phrase, ultimately revealing the forgotten password — "lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)" — which he had set while high back in 2015. The grateful owner, known online as "cprkrn," joked he would name his child after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in thanks.

Eleven years. 3.5 trillion brute-forced password attempts. Eight weeks of AI-assisted forensic archaeology. All to discover that a stoned college student once set his Bitcoin wallet password to 'lol420fuckthePOLICE!*:)' and promptly forgot about it.

The man behind this particular saga goes by the alias 'cprkrn' online and bought 5 Bitcoin back in 2015 at a Starbucks, when each coin was worth around $250. He locked them in a Blockchain.com wallet, changed the password at some point while high, and then spent the better part of a decade unable to access funds that had quietly grown to nearly $400,000.

He knew two of the three passwords required to open the wallet. The third one was gone. He drove to his parents' house to dig out old college notebooks, manually transcribing anything that looked remotely like a password or seed phrase. Nothing worked.

Eventually he turned to Claude. Armed with an old mnemonic phrase and access to his ancient college laptop, he gave Anthropic's AI the run of the machine and asked it to find a way in. After eight weeks of searching, Claude located a wallet backup file that the mnemonic phrase could decrypt. That backup contained the private keys needed to access the wallet directly, bypassing the forgotten password entirely.

The transaction history confirms it: funds sitting untouched since April 2015, then moved out this week.

Cprkrn was apparently so grateful he announced plans to name his future child after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei. Whether that offer stands now that the emotional high has presumably worn off is unclear.

The whole episode is a reasonable argument for password managers, a fairly compelling case against mixing cryptocurrency with recreational cannabis, and an oddly heartwarming demonstration that sometimes AI is most useful not for generating slop or summarising emails, but for quietly rummaging through a decade-old hard drive to find something its owner was too baked to remember.