A 70-year-old woman lost, at least for a few days, su access to a bitcoin wallet worth 55 thousand dollars. Her fear of having been scammed and a treacherous translation generated a distressing situation that was resolved thanks to the “baby steps” help of a specialist.
The grandmother, whose data was not revealed “for security reasons”, had collected that amount of digital money with the aim of leave it to your grandchildren. After the sale of a property in 2023 began to collect assets in a digital wallet until reaching almost 60 thousand dollars.
However, a word translated when writing down, It unleashed a scene of concern.
To access the wallet, like any user, the woman needed what is known as a “seed phrase.” A dozen words that must be entered in a specific order to access the account. Some, for more security, add what is known as “word 13”.
Also called Passphrase, is an “additional key” to access the correct account, the “vault” that one wants.
Matías Mathey, Bitcoin self-custody expert at the NGO Bitcoin Argentina, explained to Clarion Like any key, any modification made to the password transforms it into another key that leads somewhere else.
According to the NGO Bitcoin Argentina, “the main obstacle It was a semantic misunderstanding: The passphrase was noted, but not identified as such.” It specializes in legal advice and consulting on these issues.
“My expertise allows me to explore information from another place. This lady, because of her age, everything she did was very good. When he wanted to add something more, he found that there was nothing. That’s where the fear that she had been hacked arose. or that something happened,” explained the specialist.
That’s why his supposed account was empty. It happened that the user had entered another “vault” in which nothing had ever been deposited.
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“It took baby steps to restore the key. “I was with the daughter who most calmly gave a hand,” Mathey recalled.
In that context, for a little less than an hour and after more than a dozen times he asked the woman if she had a “passphrase.” The woman always said no, no and no.
After several reviews within the software and recreating old processes, “without wasting time, giving false expectations or being tremendous,” Mathey and the grandmother reached the key point of the case.
The thing is that on the same sheet where I had the 12 key words and their order, I also had “word 13”, but under the name “password”. The answer was always there, only because of nerves, tension and anguish, he did not realize it..
“The lady is very clear but Emotionally I was not well. It was a lot of money. She was feeling bad, resigned and even medicated,” reflects the advisor.
Meanwhile, the NGO that summoned him to help compile the case noted that the process “highlighted the human dimension of self-custody” and made reference to “memory, stress, knowledge gaps and the need for professional support.”
“The case illustrates the importance of education, clear proceduresself-custody audits and estate planning, especially for seniors or families with multiple actors involved,” they added.
A Zoom session full of nerves
The assistance session, the NGO explained to Clarín, was carried out by zoom, without shared screens or exposure of private information. Just method, dialogue and patience.
The user was emotionally overwhelmed. “The priority was to contain, understand and reconstruct its original path.” During the process, a familiar pattern emerged among those who work in self-custody accompaniment: the confusion between the passphrase—the “word 13”—and other terms such as “passphrase.”
When reviewing his notes, an isolated phrase was found, without a technical label or indication of importance. However, everything suggested that it could be the missing piece.