Ask HN: Lost $400k USD in a deleted email, how contact a Gmail engineer?

On the 8th of June 2014 I purchased 1970 Ethereum from the Ethereum Foundation Presale and received an email to my Gmail account containing my wallet. As CS student overwhelmed by his thesis I managed to completely ignore the backup instructions and instead left my wallet in my Gmail account. At least the thesis was good :)

You can probably tell where this story is going. I promptly forgot about this whole event and in 2015 while cleaning out my email account I deleted most of my recently received emails and incidently taking out the wallet with it. Again I'd like to state that the loss of the wallet is completely my fault.

Recently, the price of Ethereum has skyrocketed to over 200 USD per coin, meaning the wallet is now worth ~400k USD. This means that I can now offer a nice bounty on its retrieval!

I'm publicly posting here in the hope that someone from the Gmail team can check and see if they have a copy of the email saved in Google's backups. Should its contents be retrieveable, I'd like to offer 20% of the wallet's contents (~80k USD) as a finder's fee, alternatively if you choose to forfit this, I'll donate 50% (~200k USD) to a charity of your choice.

I realise that this is a last ditch attempt and that wallet is most likely lost forever.

This brings us to the morale of the story - "make sure you have backups and they work!" The 2nd morale is - "no matter how badly you mess up, at least you aren't the guy that deleted an email worth 400k!"

If you work on Gmail and you can help or know someone that will lead to its retrevial please contact me [at] lostethpresale@doge.st

Best wishes!

If you want, you can encrypt your mail to me with my public key: (text too long for HN) https://pastebin.com/raw/zgZpSKJd

Good luck, I will be following this story closely.

Have you tried gmail support already? If you haven't then I would say you should try that first. Going on Social media usually is best after you have exhausted this option. Also, offering compensation to Google employees is probably frowned upon by Google.

You may wish to state that you can (or can't) prove that the Gmail account is yours, and that you opened the Gmail account personally. I believe Gmail provides a discrete set of one-time keys upon account generation.

You might want to ask a lawyer to subpoena them. Time is ticking - I believe backups are held for only a bit of time.