Cannot restore whatsapp chats on a new phone

Hi There

I wonder if anyone can help me with, I guess, quite a unique problem restoring or copying my chat history from my old phone to my new phone. I hope I have explained my issue clearly enough as it might get quite confusing.

I have been using a Samsung S8+ for the last three years and I recently upgraded to a Samsung S10+.

I logged onto Whatsapp with my new phone (S10+) and it asked to verify my phone number which I did.
When I entered the app I noticed that all my chats and contacts were missing, so I had to log back onto my old phone (S8+) in order to get my messages and contacts. I discovered that my new phone did not have my contacts so I transfered them using Google Drive.
I then tried to log back onto my new phone to see if the chats had loaded, but they had not.
So I logged back onto my old phone to make sure that the chats were backed up and did another chat backup for good measure.

Now here is where it gets frustrating. Because I had logged back and forth between the two phones this many times, Whatsapp assumed that there was some kind of fraud taking place and set a timer on verifying my number, so I had to wait a couple of hours, to my frustration.
So I waited 2 hours and tried logging into my new phone again, but the chats had not loaded.
I checked the Whatsapp Help and FAQs, but found no mention of my problem, only solutions that would have been applicable the first time you try to restore the chat. Everytime I reinstalled Whatsapp on my new phone, it did not prompt me to "restore" chats as the Whatsapp FAQs said it would.
Next I waited overnight to log back into my old phone, so that when I tried to log back into my new phone it would prompt me to "restore" the chats.

This morning I logged into my new phone, expecting it to verify my number and prompt me to restre my backed up chats, but it did not. It just logged straight back in with no chats loaded, much the same as the first time I attempted this.

So the problem is, I cannot fix or troubleshoot this quickly as I have been locked out by a timer of many hours and I do not get the "restore" prompt after verifying my number on the new phone.

I cannot believe that such a simple task has turned into such a mess, and I am not prepared to use my new phone with no chat history as I'm sure most people wouldn't either. I also cannot believe that Whatsapp's customer support is basically non-existent for an app with over 5 billion downloads.

Also to note, I have used the same number and the same Google account.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated and I will accept that maybe I could have overlooked a basic process during this whole episode.

Thanks very much
Adam

So I was thinking that an internal memory import/export of chat history would be an option, but now I cannot access my Whatsapp on my old phone at all now. It says I have tried too many times.

Is there just simply a way I can contact someone at Whatsapp to resolve this?

As it stands I am now locked out of all my chats for at least another day.