A grandmother invested $60,000 in Bitcoin for her grandchildren and almost lost it due to a combination of encryption keys that looked like a hack.

A 70-year-old woman went missing, At least for a few days, sYou can access a Bitcoin wallet worth $55,000. Her fear of being scammed and treacherously translated created a painful situation that was resolved thanks to the help of “small steps” from a specialist.

The grandmother, whose data was not disclosed “for security reasons,” had collected this amount of digital money with the aim of… Leave it to your grandchildren. After selling the propertyIn 2023, I started accumulating assets in the digital wallet until it reached approximately $60,000.

but, Translated word when writing, It unleashed a scene of anxiety.

To access the wallet, like any user, the woman needed what is known as “Seed phrase.” Dozens of words that must be entered in a specific order to access the account. Some, for greater security, add what is known as… “Word 13”.

It is also called The passphrase is “extra key” To access the correct account, the “vault” one wants.

Explained Matías Matthe, a Bitcoin self-custody expert at the NGO Bitcoin Argentina Clarion Like any key, any modification made to a password turns it into another key that leads somewhere else.

According to the NGO Bitcoin Argentina, “the main obstacle It was a semantic misunderstanding: The passphrase is indicated, but not identified as such.” She specializes in providing legal advice and consulting on these issues.

“My experience allows me to explore information from elsewhere. This lady, because of her age, everything she did was very good. When he wanted to add something else, he found that there was nothing. Hence the fear of being hacked. The specialist explained that something had happened.

That’s why His supposed account was empty. It so happened that the user entered another “vault” in which nothing had been deposited at all.

“It took small steps to get the key back. “I was with my daughter who quietly helped,” Mathie recalls.

In this 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, no.

After several reviews within the program and recreating old processes, “without wasting time, giving false expectations, or going overboard,” Mathy and Grandma arrived at the bottom line of the case.

The thing is that in the same sheet where I had the 12 keywords and their rankings, I also had the “13th keyword”, but under the name “Password”. The answer was always there, but due to extreme nervousness, tension and pain, he did not realize it..

“Mrs. is very clear however Emotionally I wasn’t feeling well. It was a lot of money. She felt bad, quit, and even went to therapy,” reflects the counselor.

Meanwhile, the NGO that summoned him to help piece together the case noted that the operation “shed light on what happened.” The human dimension of self-preservation He cited “memory, stress, knowledge gaps and the need for professional support.”

“The case explains The importance of education, and clear procedures“Self-auditing and estate planning, especially for the elderly or families with multiple stakeholders,” they added.

The NGO explained to Clarin that the assistance session was conducted via Zoom, without shared screens or disclosure of private information. Just style, dialogue and patience.

The user was emotionally overwhelmed. “The priority was to contain, understand and reconstruct its original trajectory.” During this process, a familiar pattern emerged among those in the self-accompaniment business: confusion between the passphrase — “word 13” — and other terms like “passphrase.”

Upon reviewing his notes, an isolated phrase was found, without a technical designation or indication of importance. However, everything indicates that it could be The missing piece.