Invalid checksum issue with some 24-word mnemonics from csv

I managed to retrieve a few mnemonic seeds from a csv, but they keep throwing a checksum error. Some of these seeds are enclosed in less than and greater than signs, while others start with an asterisk. There's definitely something off about them. Here's the rundown of the examples: "<word1  word2  ...  word24>" results in a checksum error "*<word1  word2  ...  word24>" results in a checksum error "*word1 word2 ...  word24" results in a checksum error "word1 word2 ...  word24" works perfectly. Does anyone know what might be happening here? Is it possible that the order of the words is mixed up somehow? All the words seem to be valid BIP39 words in their own right. Could there be some kind of algorithm that scrambles them? I've also tried using BTCRecover to reorder the words, but no success thus far. Appreciate any help!

They could be in the wrong order, or the 24th word could be wrong all together.  Which wallet are you trying to recover them in?  It's possible they are Electrum generated seed phrases, in which case they will not be Bip39 compatible.

Special characters such as '*'(asterisk) are not part of BIP39 words so it's either you or you have used some tool to generate the 24 words seeds for you. Means all the 24 words are BPI39 valid but it's in the wrong orderor even possible that you replaced with some other words since you mentioned * used on it and those words probably stored in a different file that need to be replaced in that place. As I said the words are mixed in some way and only you or whoever created the words can say in which way. But all the words are valid you can recover it with BTCRecover pretty quickly with decent computational power.

For anyone to know what is going on, you need to first explain what this CSV file is, where it came from, who generated it and how?!

Well I think issue lies in the formating and encoding of the seed phrases. firstly the angle brackets (< and >) are likely what's causing the checksum error. And i think it's because the both characters are not part of the BIP39 wordlist. What recovery tool are you making use of op? the asterisk (*) might be a some kind of prefix indicating compression or even encryption so you need to check if your wallet or recovery tool supports this format Also note that BIP39 seeds follow a specific order so If the words are valid but in the wrong order, the checksum will still fail. Also check if they were stored in UTF-8 encoding format that may be an issue too. Exactly I'm pretty much just trying to guess the problem. Op should provide more information on his encoding format and the recovery tool he's attempting to use.

It's not surprising. If you don't know correct position of any word, you're performing brute-force on 24! or about 6.2e+23 possible combination. But in that case, the wallet or recovery software should show message that the input text contain invalid word (not in BIP39 or Electrum word list).

I think the (*) and (<>) symbols represent some type of ordering. If I remove those symbols and take only the 24 words, the order seems to be wrong. The CSV file was a dump of the database from a website.

That could mean a lot of things. The <> symbols could simply indicate a certain permutation of the seed words not the actual seed words itself.

If anyone want a few more information on OP's case, he has a reply on this thread: /index.php?topic=5479083.msg64629350#msg64629350 I previously advised him to create a new topic (this) since the core issue turned out to be quite off-topic. Which website specifically? The best way to help is if anyone managed to reproduce a similar ".csv" file with a test wallet on the same platform.

Whether the 24 words follows BIP 39[1] or Electrum Seed Version System[2], such symbol isn't mentioned on both specification. What website? Are there any documentation or information about the database or website itself? [1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki [2] https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/seedphrase.html

I do not have any information about the website nor how the seeds could be generated. The only thing I know about the website is that it's a WordPress website.

This! So you're wasting everyone's time. Anyone can create a seed, anyone can create some random seed words. That doesn't give it any value.

With so little information, i only could suggest you search list of WordPress plugin about cryptocurrency. You can narrow it to cryptocurrency plugin which claim to have feature to create wallet, 24 recovery words or send coin automatically. But it could take long time (since https://wordpress.org/plugins/ shows 383 for keyword "bitcoin" and 358 for keyword "crypto") with possibility you couldn't find any relevant plugin.