Your old bridge withdrawals may still be waiting

On 27 September a post by @Moudinho3 pointed people at a site called stuckfunds.eth. It passed 900,000 views within a day. The pitch: crypto you started moving between chains and never finished moving is still sitting in the bridge, waiting for one last transaction.

It's real. A bridge withdrawal has two halves. You send the funds on one chain, where they're locked or burned, and then you claim them on the other. Many bridges don't do the second half for you. If you never came back, the money is still in the bridge contract, and only the wallet that sent it can collect it. By the checker's count, $135 million sits that way across 84 bridges and more than 526,000 wallets, with another $41.7 million stuck until a bridge team acts.

HQ ran its own old wallets through it. One turned up a Polygon withdrawal from 2021: burned on Polygon, never claimed on Ethereum. We claimed it. Here is what we learned doing it.

Check without connecting anything. Paste an address at stuckfunds.eth.limo. It asks for no wallet connection and no signature. We read its code: the page talks only to its own lookup server and Cloudflare's bot check. It takes EVM, Solana, Sui, Aptos and NEAR addresses. Check every address you have ever used, especially the old ones you stopped watching.

Claim only through the bridge itself, and type the bridge's address yourself. The table below lists where each one claims. A real claim is one transaction (two on OP Stack chains) from the wallet that made the withdrawal, and it can only pay that wallet. It never needs a token approval, a signed message, a fee to a third party, or a seed phrase. The checker asks for an optional tip of 5 to 10% of what you recover; it's optional, and the bridge pays you in full either way.

Old Polygon withdrawals won't show up in the portal. Polygon's portal says PoS transactions older than 1 January 2024 are not visible there and tells you to contact support. You don't have to wait for support. Get the exit proof from Polygon's own proof service, then send the claim yourself from Etherscan:

1. Open proof-generator.polygon.technology/api/v1/matic/exit-payload/<burn tx hash>?eventSignature=0xddf252ad1be2c89b69c2b068fc378daa952ba7f163c4a11628f55a4df523b3ef, replacing <burn tx hash> with your withdrawal's transaction on Polygon (the checker shows it). Copy the long hex string after "result".

2. On Etherscan, open Polygon's bridge contract on Ethereum, RootChainManager 0xA0c6…7C77. Go to Contract, then Write as Proxy, connect the wallet that made the withdrawal, paste the hex into exit, and confirm. Ours used about 246,000 gas, around $1.40 at 2 gwei, so keep a little ETH in that wallet first.

3. If the withdrawal was already claimed, the call fails with EXIT_ALREADY_PROCESSED. Most wallets simulate a transaction before sending it and will warn you before you pay for one that fails.

Use the event signature above, not the one in the checker's own Polygon guide. As of 28 September that one has a typo, and Polygon's proof service rejects it. We flagged it to them; details are in the claims below.

The scams will follow. Nine hundred thousand people just learned that forgotten money exists and that claiming it takes a transaction. Expect copycat checkers, "claim" links in replies, and DMs offering to help. stuckfunds.eth says it never DMs first and never sends claim links, and no legitimate claim works that way. If a page wants you to connect, approve a token, or sign a message before it shows you anything, close it.