Recovering an Old Wallet with Limited Information

My relative is trying to get back into her wallet from 2015 or 2016. She has some notes but can't remember which platform or wallet she used. Here's what she has: - A seed with just four words (so she probably lost the rest) - The email she thinks she used (but she cleans her inbox a lot) - An email and password used to register somewhere - Account ID with lowercase letters and numbers separated by a hyphen. I've started with the four-word seed...

Sounds like a tough situation. If the details fit with a blockchain wallet, that’s a start. But missing 8 words from that seed? Man, finding them seems almost impossible, and brute-forcing it could take forever. By the way, the old site was blockchain.info, right? Have you tried recovering it on blockchain.com?

Is the "account ID" something like this? 25679c5b-ecbb-4b49-94e3-4b4b572005ce? If it looks like that, then it's definitely from Blockchain.info. Just to clarify, the email and the password you're talking about... is it for the email she used or the wallet?

Exactly, it's the second one. The issue is, she entered her email to log in but didn’t get a verification email. She might have changed the email linked to her blockchain.info. Now, when she tries to log in with the wallet ID, it asks for a password and says 'Authorization required, check your email.' So she probably had 2FA on.

It's not two-factor authentication, it means she needs to authorize the new device she's logging in from. Since no authorization email is coming, it seems like you're using the wrong email.

That four-word seed really raises questions. Why just four words? Maybe it’s not a typical mnemonic seed. Have you thought about a brain wallet? No checksum, just whatever you input. It might be risky to try brute-forcing that...

So the four-word backup seems invalid. For the "wallet.aes.json" file, you would need to run a script to download it from their server. But, of course, that needs email authorization. They won't just hand over sensitive data without verifying.”

Let her try to create a new account with that email, or attempt to recover the wallet ID. If she can set up a new account, that means the email isn’t linked to any existing account. Getting the wallet ID notification would indicate an issue with their email confirmations.

That email issue is a common problem we see often. Blockchain.com mentions that emails are stored in a case-sensitive way. If she registered as "abc@example.com" but you're trying "ABC@example.com", that could be the problem.

A good tip! Try entering the email with caps lock enabled. That might just do the trick. I’ve accidentally hit caps lock while typing emails before.

Quick update: So, it turns out those four words aren’t mnemonics in the usual sense. They relate to wallet id decryption. I found them on an old page from blockchain.info. They’re not part of typical wordlists.

It's so annoying when recovery methods don't work, right? I tried to recover mine on that platform once, no luck. Everything seems so convoluted. If you don’t get help from support, it feels hopeless.

Outside blockchain.com, there's no way to get that wallet back without the email linked to the blockchain.info account. They used to send encrypted private keys, so that’s kinda key.”

Just four words? That’s pretty sketchy. What made you think she actually has a wallet? This advice seems a bit off... You can’t spam your way into recovery.

You’re forgetting that those old mnemonics might still be valid through the link I posted earlier. If it's a valid mnemonic, it should work. But yeah, I doubt a 4-word seed can even be valid.

The wallet ID and password are right, but with 4 missing words, brute-forcing from 60,000 options doesn't sound promising. I got 'unknown word' when checking with that old mnemonic page.

Wait, those word lists are still available. Here’s a link to the live one. No need to dig through archived sites. But honestly, I’ve never seen anything with just words like 'a', 'aa', etc.

That's quite possible. Those could have been used for testing or something. You should check if your words fit into a different list entirely.