Recovering XRP giveaway

[dumol]

Hi all,

I confess I'm not into crypto. I have just discovered accidentally that I was awarded some XRP in March 2014. My hazy recollection is it was some sort of a giveaway from Ripple itself. Strangely, there is no email trail attached to it, so I'm not sure how it happened. I would have certainly archived any emails related to this.

All that I found in my backups is a screenshot of a web page titled "Welcome To ripple" (sic!). This shows:

1. my ripple.com/client wallet name
2. a masked passphrase (the length of which matches what I would have used)
3. a Ripple address
4. a masked secret account key (only showing the first letter, an "s").

Besides this screenshot, there was another file with a similar name, where I think I wanted to save my "secret account key" from a HTML page, but failed to do it properly. At first, I wasn't that concerned, as the text in the screenshot said "The Secret Account Key below gives access to your money in the unlikely case that you lose your wallet name or passphrase."

A bit of web searching later, I found that the "unlikely case" wasn't me losing those credentials, but instead Ripple discontinuing its wallet at ripple.com/client. Even the migration tool at https://id.ripple.com/auth/migrate#/register is not working anymore, apparently. https://www.rippletrade.com suggests opening a Gatehub account, which I did. I was able to add my known Ripple address as a valid contact. But I can't import the funds at that address as I don't have the secret account key. At https://support.gatehub.net/hc/en-us/articles/360021361513-Import-a-wallet I also see "the Ripple Trade migration feature has been discontinued."

I'm not sure why Ripple didn't warn me about the discontinuation of their wallet, but maybe the lack of any emails from them might be related. Perhaps my Ripple account had no email address attached?

Anyway, is there any hope of recovering these XRPs? It would be nice to donate them to a worthy cause, such as archive.org's end of the year donor challenge.

Thanks!

Edited December 28, 2019 by dumol
Minor editing

[TaylorWarden]

Sadly, if you do not have your secret key, the XRP and IOUs on your account will be inaccessible.  Sorry for your loss.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, dumol said:

• my ripple.com/client wallet name
• a masked passphrase (the length of which matches what I would have used)

Sadly I know nothing of these earlier wallets...   but point two there gives a faint glimmer of hope.

If you know the pass phrase and are extremely lucky there is a faint possibility that it is the seed for the key.  I doubt it to be honest, but felt I should mention it in case that faint possibility is real.

Perhaps some of the knowledgeable long time members here can chime in?

Thanks in advance for any advice from those esteemed folk I tagged.

 @tulo @Sukrim @lucky @mDuo13

[tulo]

That is a password to Ripple database. That database has moved to Gatehub for the migration which is now discontinued. 

The only chance I see is to recover the database which was unfortunately leeched from gatehub and see what you can do with it and your passphrase.

I don't have any link for the database but it was circulating some time ago. I don't have any info on how that database is structured so I cannot help more than this. Prabably @Sukrim has a better understanding of it.

[Guest]

22 hours ago, dumol said:

It would be nice to donate them to a worthy cause, such as archive.org's end of the year donor challenge.

Archive.org is sitting on a database that is worth billions and billions, if only there was a way to easily monetize content without advertisements or paywalls...

Edited December 29, 2019 by Guest

[Dario_o]

22 hours ago, dumol said:

a masked secret account key (only showing the first letter, an "s").

if you could find this elsewhere you can recover the wallet

search for any file in your computer having the same timestamp of the screenshot you have

 

[dumol]

On 12/28/2019 at 11:42 PM, Tinyaccount said:

Sadly I know nothing of these earlier wallets...   but point two there gives a faint glimmer of hope.

If you know the pass phrase and are extremely lucky there is a faint possibility that it is the seed for the key.  I doubt it to be honest, but felt I should mention it in case that faint possibility is real.

Perhaps some of the knowledgeable long time members here can chime in?

Thanks in advance for any advice from those esteemed folk I tagged.

 @tulo @Sukrim @lucky @mDuo13

Actually this is was the first thing I've tried, because my passphrase also starts with 's' and has a similar length. But no, it's not the same thing and a closer look also proved they are not the same length. Thanks anyway!

[dumol]

On 12/29/2019 at 1:14 AM, tulo said:

That is a password to Ripple database. That database has moved to Gatehub for the migration which is now discontinued. 

The only chance I see is to recover the database which was unfortunately leeched from gatehub and see what you can do with it and your passphrase.

I don't have any link for the database but it was circulating some time ago. I don't have any info on how that database is structured so I cannot help more than this. Prabably @Sukrim has a better understanding of it.

This is a very interesting approach! I can see what it could work, but I'm not that knowledgeable and/or interested into delving into such a grayish area. Thanks anyway…

If some knowledgeable gray hat sees this and has the kind heart to help, my wallet name in that DB is "dumol" as well. Please send me the encrypted secret account key and I will use my passphrase to decrypt it, if shown how. Thanks!

[dumol]

18 hours ago, Dario_o said:

if you could find this elsewhere you can recover the wallet

search for any file in your computer having the same timestamp of the screenshot you have

 

Thanks, I have the file that was supposed to hold the secret key. It's just that I saved it improperly, as described in my first post. (Stupid me saved the dynamic HTML showing me the secret key instead of copying it and pasting it into an encrypted file.)