Bitcoin Forum

I just setup Armory on a new laptop and as I was importing my wallet by entering the root key, messed up entering a few of the letter sequences.
When I went to submit this, it told me that key was recognized and asked me if the Wallet ID was mine.
It was not so I went back and found my mistakes, got it right and got to my correct Wallet ID.
I then entered a new passphrase and am good to go.
But this got me thinking, what if I'd just continued with the Wallet ID that wasn't mine?
Since the next step was to create a new Passphrase, could I have just done this and got access to whoever's wallet I mistakenly now have the root key for?

I guess you created an empty wallet, not a wallet used by someone else.

You can't consider that it's someone else's wallet just because it's valid.

The root key and Wallet ID aren't something that's pulled-out from a server during backup and crossed-checked during restoration.
The displayed "someone else's" Wallet ID was just based from the wrong (but valid) Root Key that you've entered.
Restoring someone else's wallet using a random root key would require far greater luck than winning the national lottery jackpot 1000+ times in a row.

Armory backup codes carry 4 bytes of the hash256 per line. Basically, there's a tiny chance you will type in a backup code with an undetected typo. This doesn't mean the resulting wallet has funds in it (i.e. belongs to someone else). That will realistically never happen.