The wallets were not bought
No they were not bought. They just don't exist. Deterministic wallets (your words) did not exist in those years
The Berkeley/DB format of wallets from that time is not viewable using Notepad
But what motivates someone to post such a hoax here?
There's really a good chance that the story is made up to seek help with the backup files he got access from somewhere unspecified ("
Jay").
We often get a few of this kind of topic here where obvious lies can be observed right from the OP or in the next replies.
IMO, OP's haven't reached my personal lie-detector threshold yet, but he never replied after I've pointed the errors in his detailed explanations of the story.
Just to point out, OP didn't mentioned mnemonic/words backup,
He's talking about Bitcoin Core and appears to be from correct based from wallet dump contents which is arguably created by Pywallet (
his screenshot)