Hi Stacker News.
I use a wallet notification service (cryptocurrencyalerting.com) on one of my cold wallets and I received an alert on Friday morning of a balance change. I naturally shat my pants because I haven't shared the address with anyone and really use the service just as a way to know if someone I were to get hacked.
It looks like the opposite has happened - the alert told me that the balance of my wallet increased by just under 6 BTC. I stared at it for a minute and thought ok they've clearly screwed up - but... I retrieved my seed phrase, spun up a new cold wallet and yeah - my balance is up nearly 6 BTC.
How the hell did this happen? Aren't addresses supposed to be unguessable? What do I even do now? I found the on chain transaction using mempool but what do I do with that information?
I didn't want to post this on Reddit because that's going to attract a lot more scammers. Any ideas or guidance would be greatly appreciated.
If you have any reason to suspect that your wallet seed might have been generated from a poor/bad source of randomness, I would take a deep breath, generate a new seed, and transfer your other UTXOs over to that seed instead.
You shouldn't be watching your addresses using a service like that.
I recommend sending the money back to the address you received it from. Even if you wanted to keep it, that website (and whoever they sell your data to) likely knows your identity and knowingly spending funds from a financial accident can be prosecuted as a crime in most countries.
That makes the most sense. Thanks.