[Newbies]

The title says it..is it legit or scam?

[Rayner]

They're scams. Unless you have access to the key you can't just "find" it.

[Newbies]

Thanks i got it..was a scam

[Sondrox]

I am pretty sure they are scams. You just can't find the keys like that.

[Maskin]

I don't think they are a scam, it's just that you have a better chance of winning the lottery twice before you find a private key with funds on it.

[XMR]

Technically speaking they work but in practice you'll never find anything. Paying for bitcoin private keys is a blatant scam though, not only because of your astronomically small chances of winning, but you can bet your ass that no one would give you the private key for some rich guy's address for a few dollars.

To get an idea of the scale, if I wanted to find the private key for a certain bitcoin address by randomly trying private keys until I got it, my chances are practically 0. Every random attempt has a 1 in 1,461,501,637,330,902,918,203,684,832,716,283,019,655,932,542,976 (1.46 10^48 or exactly 2^160) chance of being successful. To have about a 50% chance of cracking the key you would need to try half of the private key space (2^159). If your computer can generate 100k keys/sec, you would be sitting there for 231 decillion (231 10^33) years. For comparison, a typical human body contains 7 * 10^27 atoms.