Found old seed phrase, but it uses non-standard words

Question

I found, on my PC, a file named "MY ETH BACKUP", dated November 19th 2017. It contains my name followed by "1 ETH". It then goes on to give me a sequence of 12 words, that look like a seed phrase. The issue is that no wallet software is recognizing this as a valid phrase. After closer examination, it seems that most of the words included are NOT standard BIP39 words. It includes words like; stinger, sharply, and blooming (in a different order).

I cannot remember which wallet I used to create this phrase. It could be either an iOS or Windows wallet.

Does anyone have any insights about which wallet could have created such a phrase? I just cannot remember what else could have created this phrase. I'm fairly certain I did not just make these words up. Could this be some sort of encryption that was done to the original words?

I appreciate your time and insight!

• Mr. 69

Answer 1

I have had a near identical problem for years now. I actually have 3 different seed phrases. Two of them actually are valid Electrum phrases (old format). The third one has words that appear on both the old Electrum word list and the current one, but together they don't make a valid Electrum seed. Of course even if they did, it still wouldn't matter considering that there is no such thing as an Electrum Ether wallet...

Anyway, have you checked out Parity wallet? Their legacy seeds used a non-bip39 compliant word list. Maybe that was where you created it?

Best of luck!