Yeah most data recovery services are just scams. Have not come across anything legit, unfortunately...... Sorry.

Future reference, I would look into some kind of cloud backup services for at least your photos. I use Google photos and I never have to worry about losing my pics. Also Samsung's Smart Switch is also a good utility to backup your data. I do backup my phone about once a month or so with it.

 

Rooting wouldn't help anyway: the data were encrypted and the encryption key is gone. This problem is well beyond what some app purchased off the Web can handle (and kingroot only works on 6-7 year old versions of android - sadly the Internet is a great repository of obsolete information as well as relevant stuff).

I'm afraid there's probably no solution at all for this, certainly no cheap one. Maybe a professional forensic data recovery company could do something, but even then I have serious doubts.

 

There are organisations that specialise in chip-off forensic data recovery, Drive Savers is one. Where they actually take the device apart, and may remove the flash memory chips from the board to read them directly. Extremely expensive, and is what the feds might use to try to recover evidence data from suspects' phones.

But even that may not help you, because if they do manage to extract the chip's contents, you've very probably got a blob of AES256 encrypted data to try and crack.


Performing a factory reset on many Android devices, is really intended to be a secure erase as well. To try to ensure that any private data can't recovered afterwards, e.g. by an undesirable third-party.

 

If your wife really, really cannot recall her password this creates a big problem. Lock screens are by intent not easily bypassed and all those utilities that claim to be able to magically 'hack' into secured phones are for the most part fallacy. Despite the countless 'authentic and verified' reviews that back up their snake-oil claims just think about it. Here in the real world, if it was so trivially easy to bypass a smartphone's lock screen why don't law enforcement and other government agencies just buy one of those miracle apps instead of wasting thousands of dollars and time trying gain access to all the phones they seize?
And professional data recovery services are not just a typical consumer level service. Most of us don't have the disposable cash required to pay the final bill. It might be cheaper to have your wife see a trained psychoanalyst to see if they can coax that lost password out from her subconscious.