How to find out what crypto someone had

Unless the person left an inventory, finding their crypto is detective work. Here are the places that most often turn something up. You’re only looking and listing at this stage. Opening accounts and wallets comes later.

Bank statements

Money usually goes into crypto from a bank account. Look through a few years of statements for payments to, or from, names such as Coinbase, Kraken, Binance, Bitstamp, Gemini, Crypto.com, Bitvavo, Revolut or a payment processor you don’t recognise. Card payments to hardware wallet makers (Ledger, Trezor, BitBox, Blockstream) are a strong hint that there’s a wallet somewhere in the house.

Email

Search their mailbox, if you have lawful access to it, for:

• Exchange and wallet names like the ones above, plus MetaMask, Exodus, Trust Wallet, Phantom.
• Phrases like “deposit confirmed”, “withdrawal”, “verify your identity”, “new login”, “two-factor”, “order confirmation” together with a hardware wallet brand.
• Words like “seed”, “recovery phrase”, “wallet”, “bitcoin”, “ethereum”.

Exchanges email people about logins, deposits and yearly statements, so even an account opened years ago usually leaves something.

Tax records

• United States: from tax year 2025 onwards, crypto brokers send customers Form 1099-DA reporting sales, and Form 1040 asks every taxpayer whether they received or disposed of digital assets during the year (IRS).
• United Kingdom: capital gains pages on a Self Assessment return often list crypto disposals.
• European Union: from 2026, crypto service providers collect information about their customers for the tax authorities under a directive called DAC8. That data isn’t handed to heirs directly, but the accountant or tax adviser who did their returns may know which platforms they used.

Their accountant, if they had one, is worth a phone call either way.

Phones and computers

With the device unlocked, look for:

• Apps from exchanges and wallets. A wallet app on a phone may hold funds directly.
• Browser extensions such as MetaMask, Rabby or Phantom on their computer.
• Authenticator apps (Google Authenticator, Authy, Microsoft Authenticator). The list of entries shows which services they used two-factor codes for, which is often a list of their exchanges.
• Desktop wallet software such as Sparrow, Electrum, Exodus, Ledger Wallet or Trezor Suite.
• Password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, the phone’s own). Entries for exchanges, and sometimes notes, are listed there.

If you can’t unlock a device, don’t guess the code more than a couple of times. Ask the phone maker about their process for deceased users, and check whether the person set up a legacy contact.

Paper and objects

Look for:

• Notebooks or cards with lists of 12 or 24 unrelated English words. That’s a seed phrase.
• Metal plates, capsules or tiles with words or letters stamped into them. That’s a seed backup made to survive fire.
• Small electronic devices with a screen and a USB port or buttons: hardware wallets.
• Envelopes marked “crypto”, “bitcoin”, “for my executor”, or with a date and signature.

Public addresses are safe to look up

A crypto address (a long string starting with, for example, bc1, 1, 3 or 0x) is public information. You can paste an address into a blockchain explorer such as mempool.space for Bitcoin or etherscan.io for Ethereum to see its balance. Nothing can be stolen this way, but type the explorer’s address yourself: fake explorer sites exist. What you must never paste anywhere is a seed phrase or a private key.

Write it all down

Make a list as you go: what you found, where, and what it seems to be. The asset inventory template works for heirs too. That list is what the lawyer or notary will need, and it’s the basis for the next steps: claiming exchange accounts and dealing with wallets.