To save a few bucks someone decided to buy a hardware wallet from a questionable non-official source.
I guess that didn't turn out to be such a great idea.
Do you know someone who is super cheap even when they may be well-off?
Such people must know that hardware wallets are not the only ways to store bitcoins safely. They can use open source non custodial wallet softwares like Bitcoin Core, Electrum wallets and store their bitcoins safely as well.
Hardware wallet is good and better for security purposes and long-term storage of bitcoin than hot wallet because the private keys are always offline which makes it less vulnerable to hackers, only if your seed phrase is seen by a third party. It's also good to store huge amounts of funds.
If you cannot buy a hardware wallet or don't know how to get one, and you have an old PC, you can use electrum cold storage and generate your private keys on an airgapped device. This is also a good cold storage wallet.