It all sounds a little suspect if you ask me,
I freelance for wallet recovery services. Sometimes they have something they can't figure out, and they present the problem to me. Often this also involves me talking with the customer and doing sleuthing etc.
When I can't figure something out, just in case, I'll go to forums/social media and ask around. When I do that, I always say "my friend asked me for X and Y", because i don't think anybody cares about the details of exactly why I need help...
In this case, after investigating, it turns out the customer's story about a 10 year old iphone is bullshit, and his private key can easily be found just through Googling. Apparently this is pretty common, if you run a wallet recovery service, people will frequently contact you with keys they found randomly on the internet, pretending they are theirs, asking you for help with getting them to work.
This is against TOS, but still people do it all the time. It's pretty annoying.
