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They already had the wallet on their old phone. It is already a hot wallet and it’s safe to assume that the seed phrases were generated by that wallet, online. You shouldn’t trust that seed anyways, imho. However, I see no problem restoring the wallet on a new phone. It’s nothing that wasn’t there before anyways. *If* OP does t want to change the setup.
Best case scenario wouldn’t be to take that hot seed and put it in a Trezor, lol. That would be a fatal mistake.
Get a Trezor, generate your own seed with dice or whatever, and then transfer the coins from old wallet to new wallet. That’s the only way this disaster-waiting-to-happen can be prevented.

If he followed the golden rule, he wouldn't have this problem in the first place. And the phrase "into what I believed was a legitimate Trezor page" doesn't change a thing in this whole story. You don't enter your recovery phrase into a website, ever! It's so simple.
Regarding the exchange, OP is UK based and the exchange is Chinese. HTX follows Chinese law, not UK law. It's really not that difficult to explain.

The legal structure of the **HTX cryptocurrency exchange** (formerly known as Huobi) is complex, decentralized, and spread across multiple international shell companies and regional jurisdictions.
quick google search.
A) The company OP has business with is most probably already liquidated
B) HTX will have a complex structure of different shell companies in different jurisdictions. They literally the gateway for USDT on TRON I bet as owned by Justin

I am very sorry for your loss!
I hope the situation turns around and you start a new thread soon sharing news about the refund.
As for the users who are looking down on you, insulting you, and hurling abuse—without any reason or need—please reflect on your own lives. And be careful: when we think we’re at the top, the fall is much harder; we never know what tomorrow brings.
Respect others if you want to be respected!
The OP never denied his mistakes, and he is quite knowledgeable about the Bitcoin ecosystem; we should encourage him to keep going rather than looking down on him or insulting him for no reason.
We should offer guidance when needed instead of saying "Bitcoin isn't for you"; Bitcoin is for everyone, not just a select part of the population. No one is better or smarter than anyone else—that’s just pure arrogance.
The OP’s point is valid: Bitcoin is traceable, yet exchanges are bureaucratic—full of rules and KYC requirements—while failing to do the basics, such as freezing funds for investigation the moment they become aware they are being used for scams.
It’s a complex case, as it involves cross-border legal precedents...
It’s worth reflecting on this: exchanges are inherently very risky, and they only use bureaucracy when it suits them, not when it’s actually necessary.
Let’s keep the old Bitcoin maxim front and center.

They say they are. But they have never been granted a license there. They are globally considered a non-compliant entity with regards to AML for a reason and OP's case is an example of why.
Here is a warning released by the Seychelles Financial Regulator. They explicitly state no licence was ever granted at the time of the alert (2023): https://fsaseychelles.sc/media-corner/regulatory-updates/alert-huobi-global-limited-194155
Here is the current official list of the exchanges registered in Seychelles jurisdiction. HTX/ Huobi has never been in them:
https://fsaseychelles.sc/vasp/licensed-vasps
Htx/ Huobi has recently been sanctioned in UK, US, EU...
This shows that, even when coins ended up with an exchange, it doesn't mean it will cooperate. Criminals effectively use HTX as a mixer, because international law enforcement agencies won't receive KYC details from the entity. Depositing the to HTX was probably a conscious part of their plan.

Hi OP,
The central problem with your argument is that it conflates the entropy of the final Bitcoin private key with the security of the derivation process after partial compromise. Nobody is claiming that a passphrase makes a 256-bit private key into a 300-bit private key. The relevant threat model is an attacker who has obtained the BIP39 mnemonic but not the passphrase. In that situation, a genuinely high-entropy passphrase presents an additional brute-force problem that simply does not exist in a seed-only wallet. Nor is separating a seed and passphrase equivalent to splitting a 24-word mnemonic in half: these have different security properties and failure modes, and BIP39 was explicitly designed to incorporate an optional passphrase into seed derivation. BIP85 also solves a different problem, deterministic generation of independent entropy rather than protecting a wallet after compromise of its mnemonic. I agree with the broader point that passphrases introduce operational risk and shouldn’t be recommended indiscriminatelythough because forgotten or incorrectly backed-up passphrase is catastrophic. But that is an argument for using passphrases competently and according to the threat model, not an argument that they provide no additional security.

Great way to blame a victim. You are the looser, since you have difficulties understanding that OP has a problem with enforcement of the high court judgement instead of being shamed for a mistake he/she made. Scammers are the ones to be shame/called out not victims…
For the same reasons/using the same logic you could call the coldcard users stupid for not using dice rolls and trusting a very expensive device to deliver the advertised security, but that is far for the truth.

This is absolutely stupid. You should not follow these instructions. OP advice should be ignored. Your wallet can still be attacked, if it has weak entropy, no matter if it's loaded on your HD wallet or not.

Please utilize this sticky thread for all general **Bitcoin** discussions! If you see posts on the front page or /r/Bitcoin/new which are better suited for this daily discussion thread, please help out by directing the OP to this thread instead. Thank you!
If you don't get an answer to your question, you can try phrasing it differently or commenting again tomorrow.
Please check the [previous discussion thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1vl9356/daily_discussion_august_11_2026/) for unanswered questions.

Mods, please delete and ban OP

OP, You have the be the best damn pirate that's ever existed

OP how many times have you used fiat in the past week (pay bills, buy groceries, put shelter over your head) and what did you use your digital currencies for in that same time?

OP is why the crypto community ain’t my people even though bitcoin is my money.

yeah the tl;dr is it was a soft fork that tried to kill ordinals and inscriptions by tightening the rules on what data can go into transactions. they wanted to limit OP\_RETURN and also restrict witness data so you can't sneak in jpegs and tokens through the backdoor. the technical problem was that to actually enforce this you'd need miners to adopt the new rules, and miners like fees. ordinals were paying way more in fees than regular transactions so from a miner perspective you're asking them to vote for less money. plus the whole thing was a soft fork, meaning nodes that don't upgrade still see the chain as valid, but the upgraded nodes would reject blocks that violate the new rules. that creates a weird situation where you could have a chain split if not enough miners enforce it, which is exactly what happened. not enough hashpower followed the new rules so the fork just became a minority chain that nobody uses.

the centralisation argument is a bit overblown, the existing chain works the same as before, miners just didn't want to give up fee revenue and the whole thing felt like trying to force a specific vision of what bitcoin should be used for

OP wants you to stop buying that McDouble and stack more sats damnit. This is the way.

The reason this seems more political than technical is because it literally is more political than technical lol. There isn't much technical aspect behind it besides the BIP itself and the game theory.
It's effectively a dead effort at this point. The chain forked and then stalled after the second block mined. Miners chose the "legacy" or bitcoin core chain almost unanimously. The BIP-110 supporters aren't happy (obviously). They're saying the miners colluded and/or were lobbied into choosing the legacy-chain and thus colluded against the wishes of the node runners (despite the number of node runners running BIP-110 clients were an overall minority). They're in talks about changing PoW and "firing the miners" which apparently is just making a new coin unironically.
From a theoretical perspective, BIP-110 is a no-brainer IMHO. Bitcoin originally had a small OP_RETURN size, going back to that is logical. But, it had some technical consequences for taproot. And, the process of getting the BIP approved and signaled and everything was a #$% show. It was forced through & required people to run another client (Bitcoin Knots instead of Bitcoin Core). On the other size of the argument (pro BIP-110), I get that miners being influenced, colluding, or even being coerced is bad for Bitcoin because consensus rules then become _centralized_ by those with money and power (not the node-running poor plebs like you and me). And obviously having a massive OP_RETURN is bad because it increases the memory it takes to run a node (especially as the chain grows). Increasing memory costs just compounds the cost of running a node thus making Bitcoin move away from its small-footprint, decentralized origins.

Hm. What carve-out do you think OP is referring to?
> The carve-out is cross-border trade settlement

"Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 110 (BIP-110) was a failed, controversial soft fork proposal aimed at restricting non-financial data, such as Ordinals and BRC-20 tokens, from the Bitcoin blockchain to reduce network congestion. The proposal sought to enforce a monetary-only use case by limiting output sizes and capping OP_RETURN data, facing backlash over potential censorship and network division"

This guy in financing the next proposal in the Bitcoin protocol. He is focussing on OP\_CAT and keeps an external developing team, financed via his company StarkWare and his Starknet Foundation.
And the same guys that claim, the market will solve the problem of spam are slutty enough to accept money and proposals from influencers like him.
Prepare for the downfall of Bitcoin. Maybe the developing LukeCoin is the last resort or a life boat for Bitcoiners, when these guys are done with destroying Bitcoin.
https://preview.redd.it/0ag957gmmsih1.png?width=1194&format=png&auto=webp&s=490c65adca4a079996fbef904dcc90eb4ffdff5a

Hep OP u/TerminatedPotato , do post your findings after running a full audit of all existing hardware wallets on the market. Appreciate it!