A month or so ago we were contacted by a client in Ireland who had put their Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple (XRP) onto a Trezor Model T wallet. They’d written down their seed words correctly and also enabled the passphrase feature to create a hidden wallet where they’d stored their crypto.
They made a note of their passphrase and then put the Trezor away in a drawer. Several months later they connected their Trezor, entered the passphrase and were taken to an empty wallet. They double and triple checked the passphrase and confirmed they were using what they believed to be the correct passphrase, but the same empty wallet opened displaying a zero balance. There were no transaction details either. It was therefore extremely likely that the client was using an incorrect passphrase.
The client was able to provide us with lots of information about what the passphrase might be and using this information we tried in excess of 4 billion passphrase combinations over a period of several weeks. Unfortunately none of these worked.
Having exhausted all the variations of possible passphrases he could think of we then used a different technique to attempt to crack the wallet. After 3 days were were successful and the client was happily reunited with Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple that he thought he’d lost
