Not sure why someone would make it up.. I wonder how many "stories" like this that you've seen every month could have resulted in you getting a significant amount of money for simply helping someone out instead of being skeptical that someone is just wasting time on the internet making up some ridiculous story. Things happen in people's lives. Not everything goes the way people plan. Plenty of people early on in Bitcoin didn't realize the value that what they were doing may have later on and forgot about it, misplaced things, or "life" happened. People do bad things to other people, especially over money. All kinds of ridiculous things happen to people that aren't talked about. I figured I'd leave the details out, but all of it is very reasonably explainable. That said, believe what you want, I'm not going to waste time arguing about it. The one thing I will say is this: The reason it has been such a pain to get this recovered and taken so much time is reactions like yours when it could have been a simple process. I guess I should have lied and said something more believable.

That, and it was easy to make a paper backup back then. It was just a matter of writing down or printing a number of characters. An average English word is about 5 characters in length, so if you make a 12-word backup phrase, you're going to write out or somehow save 60 characters. A private key isn't much more difficult, if not easier.