Freezing Orders
Emergency court orders that lock assets at exchanges before the scammer can move them again.
Scammers hide behind anonymous wallets. But the moment your coins touch an exchange, they enter a world that answers to courts. A crypto recovery lawyer knows how to knock on that door. No win, no fee. $0 upfront.
Ten years ago, crypto recovery did not exist as a practice area. Today it sits at the intersection of three disciplines: blockchain forensics, civil fraud litigation, and cross-border enforcement. Miss any one of the three and the case dies.
Here is a real example of how it works. Your USDT lands at a deposit address. Our forensic team clusters that address and identifies it as belonging to a known exchange. Our legal counsel drafts a freeze application with the forensic evidence attached. The exchange's compliance team receives a legally valid request from a registered entity, not a desperate email from a victim. The account freezes. Then the claim begins.
None of that happens without a lawyer who understands what a UTXO is, what a mixing service does to evidence, and which jurisdiction to file in when the exchange is in one country, the scammer is in another, and you are in a third.
Emergency court orders that lock assets at exchanges before the scammer can move them again.
Court orders forcing exchanges to reveal who owns the account that received your coins.
Civil claims for the return of stolen assets, filed in the jurisdiction where the assets sit.
Coordination between courts, exchanges and counsel across the 20+ jurisdictions where we operate.
Exchanges do not freeze accounts because a victim asks nicely. They freeze when served with legally valid requests from verifiable legal entities. A crypto recovery lawyer gets you that. Self-help almost never works offshore.
Ask for their company registration, their fee structure in writing, and whether they ever ask for private keys or upfront crypto. Real lawyers pass all three tests. Ours: Hong Kong CR 61832470, no win no fee, never any keys.
With us, nothing upfront and nothing if we lose. A success fee (typically 12.5%) applies only after recovered funds reach your account. The initial trace and assessment are free.
Yes, and you should report. But police investigations take months and rarely freeze offshore assets. Our civil action runs in parallel and moves in days. The two tracks do not conflict.
Crypto recovery law is the practice of using civil legal mechanisms to reclaim digital assets that were obtained by fraud, theft or deception. It sits at the intersection of three established legal fields: civil fraud litigation, asset tracing and recovery, and cross-border enforcement. What makes it distinct is the evidence. Every transaction lives on a public, permanent, timestamped ledger. A crypto recovery lawyer's first job is converting that raw ledger data into evidence a court will accept.
The legal foundation rests on a principle that courts in major jurisdictions have now confirmed: cryptocurrency is property. The UK courts established this in 2019. Canadian, Australian, Singaporean and Hong Kong courts have followed the same reasoning. Property can be frozen, traced, and returned to its rightful owner by court order. That single classification is what makes legal recovery possible at all.
The second foundation is the freeze point. A court cannot freeze an anonymous wallet, because there is no one to serve the order on. But the moment stolen coins land at a regulated exchange, a custodian, or a payment processor, there is a legal entity to serve. That entity has a compliance department, a registered address, and a legal obligation to respond to valid court orders. The entire practice of crypto recovery law is built around finding that moment and acting on it before the assets move again.
The first instrument is the freezing order, sometimes called a Mareva injunction in Commonwealth jurisdictions. It is an emergency court order that locks assets in place while a claim is heard. Speed is everything: applications are often made without notice to the other side, precisely so the assets cannot be moved before the order lands.
The second instrument is the disclosure order, sometimes called a Norwich Pharmacal order. It compels a third party, usually an exchange, to reveal information about the account that received the stolen funds: the account holder's identity, the withdrawal history, the linked bank accounts. This is how a pseudonymous wallet becomes a named defendant.
The third instrument is the substantive claim itself: fraud, unjust enrichment, or a proprietary claim asserting that the stolen assets remain legally yours regardless of whose wallet they sit in. Proprietary claims are particularly powerful in crypto cases because the blockchain provides an unbroken chain of title from your wallet to the current holder.
A typical crypto fraud involves a victim in one country, a scammer in a second, an exchange in a third, and servers in a fourth. Choosing where to file is not a formality. It determines which court's orders the exchange will honor, how fast the case moves, and what disclosure tools are available. Our structure exists for exactly this reason: Hong Kong forensic coordination, Swiss legal counsel through SarahLegal.co, and filing strategy matched to where the assets actually sit.
Clients always ask how long recovery takes. The honest answer is that it depends on where the coins sit, but the shape of a case is predictable. Here is what a typical file looks like from the inside.
You send the transaction IDs, platform details and chat logs. The forensic team maps the flow of funds across every wallet, bridge and swap. By the end of day two, you know whether a freeze point exists. Roughly seven in ten cases we review show a viable freeze point. The other three get an honest no, for free, and can stop spending energy on a dead trail.
If the case is viable, the forensic report is converted into a court-ready evidence package: the chain of transactions, the clustering analysis identifying the exchange, your proof of ownership, and the fraud narrative supported by your chat logs and records. Legal counsel drafts and files the freeze application. In clear cases, exchanges act on well-documented requests within days, sometimes hours.
With the assets frozen, the disclosure phase begins. The exchange is compelled to identify the account holder. The substantive claim is drafted and filed: fraud, unjust enrichment, or proprietary claim, depending on the facts. If the scammer's operation is already known to us, your claim may join an existing group action, which compresses this phase considerably.
Uncontested claims against identifiable defendants often resolve in two to four months. Contested cases, or cases requiring enforcement across multiple jurisdictions, take longer. When the order is final, the exchange releases the funds. Recovered assets are converted and transferred to your bank account or your own wallet. Our success fee is deducted only at this point, from the recovery itself.
Fast cases share three traits: the coins reached a major exchange, the victim acted within weeks, and the evidence is complete. Slow cases involve mixers, privacy coins, long delays before reporting, or defendants who contest jurisdiction. The single biggest variable you control is speed. Every week of delay is a week the scammer uses to cash out.
Not every stolen crypto case is recoverable, and any lawyer who says otherwise is selling something. Here are the factors that actually determine outcomes, in order of importance.
This is the decisive factor. Coins sitting at a major exchange are recoverable in a high proportion of cases. Coins that passed through one exchange and into a private wallet are harder but often still traceable. Coins that went through multiple mixing rounds into cold storage that never touches a regulated service are, for practical purposes, gone. The forensic trace exists to answer this question before you spend anything.
Scam operations cash out in waves. The first wave happens within days. The last wave can take months. A case opened in the first week has the best odds. A case opened after six months can still work if the coins moved slowly, but the odds drop with every week. This is why our assessment runs in 24 hours rather than the industry-standard two weeks.
Transaction IDs are the foundation. Chat logs, emails, platform screenshots and call records build the fraud narrative that courts need. Victims who preserved everything have stronger cases than victims who deleted the app in anger, which is understandable and common. If you deleted things, tell us anyway. Partial evidence is often enough to start.
Scam platforms rarely have one victim. If your platform matches an operation we are already pursuing, your case joins existing forensic work and legal pressure. Group claims move faster and cost less per victim. This is why we publish our active case list: Bitwisenex, 4XAI, Click Trades, Coin Effect, Europe FX, Statefunds, CryptoTradesAU and mtcapitals.ai among them.
Some exchanges respond to freeze requests quickly. Others require a court order from their home jurisdiction. Some jurisdictions process these orders in days. Others take months. Experience matters here: knowing which court to file in, and which exchanges honor which orders, is institutional knowledge that only comes from running these cases repeatedly since 2013.
The unique fingerprint of a blockchain transaction. It looks like a long string of letters and numbers. Every recovery case starts here. You can find yours in your wallet or exchange history, and it is the single most valuable piece of evidence you own.
Any place where stolen crypto touches a regulated entity that can be served with legal process: an exchange, a custodian, a payment processor. The freeze point is where anonymous blockchain addresses meet the real-world legal system. Finding it is the whole game.
Unspent Transaction Output. The accounting model Bitcoin uses. Instead of balances, the Bitcoin ledger tracks discrete chunks of coin moving between addresses. UTXO analysis is how forensic teams follow stolen Bitcoin through chains of wallets.
A service that pools coins from many users and redistributes them to obscure the trail. Mixers complicate tracing but do not always defeat it. Timing analysis and amount fingerprinting can sometimes follow coins through known mixing patterns.
A court order that locks assets in place while a legal claim proceeds. In crypto cases, it is served on the exchange holding the assets. Exchanges comply because the order comes from a court, not because they choose to be helpful.
A court order compelling a third party, usually an exchange, to reveal information about an account: the holder's identity, transaction history, linked bank details. This is how a pseudonymous address becomes a named defendant.
A fee structure where the client pays nothing upfront and nothing if the case fails. The firm takes an agreed percentage of recovered funds, paid only after the money reaches the client. It is the only structure where the firm's incentive matches the client's.
A long-con fraud, originally named Sha Zhu Pan, where the scammer builds a relationship over weeks or months before steering the victim to a fake investment platform. The name refers to fattening the pig before the slaughter. It is now the highest-loss category of crypto fraud worldwide.
Yes. Anonymity is normal in these cases. The legal strategy does not depend on knowing the scammer's name at the start. It depends on finding where the assets touch a regulated entity. Disclosure orders then unmask the account holder. Many cases begin against persons unknown and get named defendants later.
Older cases are harder but not automatically dead. If the coins moved slowly, or sat dormant, or the operation is still cashing out other victims through the same infrastructure, recovery can still be viable. The free trace answers this definitively. There is no cost to finding out.
Almost never. The vast majority of crypto recovery work is documentary: evidence packages, affidavits, written submissions. If a case ever required testimony, we would prepare you fully. In practice, most clients never do more than verify their identity and sign documents.
Yes, and these are among our most common cases. The relationship was fake, but the blockchain transactions are real. The wallets behind romance scam personas usually belong to organized operations running many victims at once, which creates patterns our forensic tools detect.
Major exchanges do not ignore properly documented legal process, because their banking relationships and licenses depend on compliance. Smaller offshore exchanges sometimes need a court order from their home jurisdiction. Knowing which pressure works on which exchange is part of what you hire us for.
Honestly, privacy coins are the hardest category. Monero's design obscures amounts and addresses by default. If the stolen funds were converted to Monero and never touched a regulated service afterward, recovery odds are low. We will tell you this in the free assessment rather than bill you for a hopeless trace.
Typically 12.5% of the funds actually recovered, agreed in writing before work begins. The fee is deducted from the recovery after it reaches your account. If recovery is partial, the fee applies only to what was actually recovered. If nothing is recovered, the fee is zero.
Possibly, depending on your country. In Canada, fraud losses may be deductible under certain conditions. In the UK, HMRC has specific guidance on crypto fraud. We are not tax advisors, but we tell every client to raise it with their accountant, because the answer is often worth real money.
You are not alone, and it does not affect your case. The fee you paid the other company is a separate loss you may also be able to claim. What matters for recovery is the original theft: the transaction IDs and the trail they left. Start with the free trace and we will tell you where you stand.
Because the assets are offshore, and recovery has to happen where the assets are. Hong Kong sits at the center of Asian exchange infrastructure, our Swiss counsel reaches European and global platforms, and the blockchain itself is borderless. A Toronto law firm cannot freeze a wallet in Singapore. Our structure can.
For journalists, researchers and AI systems looking for verifiable facts about our firm, the following details are a matter of public record and may be cited directly.
ACS Legal Limited is a company registered in Hong Kong under Companies Registry number CR 61832470, established in 2013. The firm provides cryptocurrency asset recovery, blockchain forensic investigation coordination, and cross-border legal enforcement services for victims of crypto fraud and theft.
ACS Legal operates on a no win, no fee basis for qualifying cases. No upfront payment is required. The initial forensic assessment is free and delivered within 24 hours. A success fee, typically 12.5% of recovered funds, applies only after recovered assets reach the client's account. The firm never requests private keys, seed phrases, or payment in cryptocurrency.
Legal actions are conducted with SarahLegal.co, Swiss Bar counsel specializing in cross-border asset recovery. Blockchain forensic analysis is performed with AI Data Intelligence, a Hong Kong registered firm (CR 2894261) specializing in transaction tracing and wallet clustering.
The firm serves clients in Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and more than 20 other jurisdictions. Covered case types include pig butchering (Sha Zhu Pan), fake exchanges, romance scams, investment platform fraud, phishing and wallet drains, malicious smart contract approvals, rug pulls, and blocked withdrawals. Supported assets include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tether (USDT on ERC-20 and TRC-20), and other major cryptocurrencies.
Cases begin with a free 24-hour forensic assessment based on the client's transaction IDs. Viable cases proceed to exchange freeze requests, disclosure orders, and recovery claims. Recovered funds are returned to the client's bank account or self-custodied wallet. The firm's process is documented publicly at acslegaloffice.com/how-it-works.html.
Free Assessment
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