@ndy856you won't be punished for not knowing if your insurance is a true HDHP; you would potentially suffer consequences if your plan really wasn't an HDHP.
If you opened and contributed to an HSA without having qualifying HDHP coverage, then, yes, your contributions would be disallowed, they would be added back to your income, and you may face various penalties and interest from tax newly assessed from a previous year.
However, in practice, I don't know how the IRS would know that you did not have an HDHP unless they discovered it as part of a detailed audit. Unless HDHPs report the SS#s of people who have valid HDHP policies to the IRS (I don't think they do), the IRS can't easily cross reference your tax return to the HDHP database (which, as I suggested, may not exist).
Having said that, if you realize that you made contributions to an HSA when you were not eligible, you would do well to amend previous returns to clean it up. If you are part of the 1% or so who get random detailed audits each year, the auditor may well ask you for details such as your insurance carrier. Then it will all come out.
And while the normal "statute of limitations" on audits is 3 years, that number gets reset if you amend the return for any reason (another 3 years), and if the IRS suspects fraud there is no "statute of limitations". So you might have this hanging over your head for quite a while.
