How can you make sure a wallet file is the real deal? It's super important to know this stuff if you're dealing with crypto. Anyone got tips or tools to help verify these files? Let's share what we know.
Just make sure that YOU created the file. If you created it then no problem.
If you bought a wallet.dat file you have been scammed. Period.
If someone is selling one you need to ask yourself - WHERE did they get it from followed by, WHY are they selling it. No one in their right mind would ever sell their file if it is a valid file and contains coins..
Verify what? That it holds coins? Without the private keys to it - no and without said keys you cannot do ANYTHING with it.
Again - do not buy them. They are ALL scams. Period.
As far as I know, there's no command to verify that.
And since it can be loaded without decrypting it fist, Core will not be able to tell if its encrypted keys are actually correct.
So as a workaround to verify, you must sync Bitcoin Core, rescan the wallet until the UTXO are available to spend, create and sign a transaction that's ready for broadcast
Then use testmempoolaccept command to check if that transaction is correctly signed. (the command will not broadcast it)
If it's fake, the transaction will usually contain an invalid signature so the command will return with an error.