Pig Butchering
A stranger becomes a friend, then a lover, then an investment coach. The platform shows huge gains. The withdrawal never works. The money is real, and it left a trail.
The person who scammed you was patient. They spent weeks building trust. Now they are gone and your crypto is sitting in a wallet somewhere. That wallet has an address. Addresses can be traced. No win, no fee. $0 upfront.
A stranger becomes a friend, then a lover, then an investment coach. The platform shows huge gains. The withdrawal never works. The money is real, and it left a trail.
The site looks like Binance. It is not. Your deposit went straight to the scammer's wallet, but that wallet has to cash out somewhere.
They said they loved you. They also said to send USDT for an emergency or a joint investment. The wallet address does not lie, even though they did.
MT4/MT5 clones with rigged charts. Bitwisenex, Click Trades, Europe FX. We hold active claims against platforms like these right now.
Every Canadian victim we work with says the same thing: "I cannot believe I fell for it." Here is the truth. These operations are run by organized groups with scripts, psychologists and professional web developers. They fooled a dentist in Vancouver. They fooled an engineer in Calgary. They fooled a retired teacher in Ottawa.
Shame keeps victims quiet, and silence protects the scammers. You reporting it and fighting back is the one thing they did not plan for.
We handle the fight. Our forensic team traces your coins through every wallet hop. Our Swiss legal partners freeze the assets at the exchange. You get updates in plain English, not legal jargon.
Not every case is recoverable. If your coins went through three mixers into a private wallet that never touches an exchange, we will tell you straight. No false hope, no invoice.
Crypto sits at exchanges for days or weeks, not months. The sooner we serve a freeze request, the better the odds. That is why our assessment takes 24 hours, not two weeks.
Freezing is step one. Recovery requires claims, evidence packages and sometimes court orders. That is what our Swiss Bar partners at SarahLegal.co do all day, every day.
We fail every one of those tests, on purpose. Verify us: Hong Kong CR 61832470.
Understanding how the scam worked on you is not just therapeutic. It is operationally useful. The scripts these operations follow are standardized, and each script leaves a distinctive pattern of evidence. Knowing the pattern tells us where to look.
Every script opens with a low-stakes contact. A wrong-number text. A dating app match. A comment on your social post. A WhatsApp group invite. The goal is never money at this stage. It is a reply. The operation measures success in response rates, and the scripts are A/B tested across thousands of approaches until the openers outperform everything a lonely or curious person has built defenses against.
Days to months of trust construction. The persona is consistent because it is shared: one victim often talks to a team working shifts from a script document. They remember your details because they log them. They are always slightly out of reach geographically, which prevents the meeting that would break the illusion. During this stage they never ask for money. They are building the only asset the scam needs: your trust.
The introduction of money, framed as opportunity or emergency. The investment platform they "use themselves." The crisis that needs bridging. The first transfer is small, and crucially, a small withdrawal often succeeds. That success is scripted. It is the single most expensive proof-of-concept the scammer buys, and it works on almost everyone.
Deposits escalate. The dashboard shows gains engineered to trigger greed and loss aversion in sequence: up enough to make you want more, then a dip that the persona coaches you to buy. When you attempt a serious withdrawal, the obstacles begin: taxes, verification fees, anti-money-laundering deposits. Each is calibrated to be just below the amount that would make you walk away.
The persona vanishes, the platform goes dark, or support hardens into scripted obstruction. Victims describe this stage as the most disorienting, because the relationship and the money evaporate simultaneously. This is also when the second scam often arrives: the fake recovery agent who knows your details because the same crew sold them.
Each stage generates evidence with forensic value. The approach gives us the persona's contact points. The build gives us language patterns that link your case to other victims of the same crew. The pivot gives us the platform and the first wallet. The extraction gives us every transaction ID. Even the discard helps: the timing of the cutoff often correlates with cash-out waves we can see on-chain. Your painful experience, documented, becomes the map.
Your transaction IDs go straight to the forensic team. While the trace runs, a case manager reviews your narrative: the platform, the persona, the timeline, the amounts. By the end of the first day you have two things most victims have not had since the scam began: a clear picture of where your money actually went, and an honest assessment of whether it can be reached.
Viable means the trace located your coins, or coins from the same pool, at a point with a legal identity: an exchange deposit address, a custodial service, a payment processor. About seven in ten cases we assess are viable or better. Viable cases move to a written no win, no fee agreement before any further work, so the terms are fixed while everything is still free.
From your side, nothing dramatic. You sign documents, we file them, and one day we call to tell you the account holding your funds is locked. From the scammer's side, it is the moment the machine stops: the withdrawal fails, support tickets go unanswered, and an operation built on invisible money movement discovers it is suddenly very visible.
The freeze holds the money. The claim makes it yours again. Disclosure proceedings unmask the account holder. The substantive filing sets out the fraud with your evidence attached. When the operation is one we already pursue, your claim joins a group action and the heavy lifting is shared. When it is new to us, we build it fresh, and your case may become the foundation other victims later join.
Recovered funds convert to fiat or transfer as crypto to your own wallet, your choice. The success fee, agreed in writing at the start, comes out of the recovery. The file closes with documentation you can use for your tax return and your police report. Clients tell us the strangest part is the ordinary bank notification: after months of watching fake numbers on a scam dashboard, real money arriving quietly feels almost anticlimactic. It is our favorite part of the job.
No topic on this page matters more than this one, because every scam victim is a marked target for the second act. Understanding exactly how recovery scams work is the best protection we can give you, whether or not you hire us.
Victim lists are sold between criminal groups, or harvested from the original platform's database. That is why the recovery agent knows your name, the platform, and often the amount. Inside knowledge feels like credibility. It is actually proof of the opposite: legitimate firms cannot know your details until you give them, because they have no pipeline to criminal databases.
The claims follow patterns. "We have located your funds." No one can locate funds before you provide transaction data. "We work with Interpol." International police bodies do not partner with cold-calling recovery agents. "A small refundable deposit secures the release." There is no release, and the deposit is the product. "We need your wallet credentials to verify ownership." That is the theft, happening in real time.
Money before results. Every fake recovery operation, without exception, monetizes before delivering anything, because delivery is not their business model. A firm that works only for a success fee has bet its own time and money on your case. That single structural fact separates the industry more cleanly than any website, testimonial or registration badge.
Do not argue, do not pay, do not send documents. Save the messages as evidence, because the contact itself is intelligence about the network that scammed you. Then tell us about it during your assessment. Second-act contacts sometimes reveal the operation's current infrastructure, which occasionally helps the first case.
In everyday use they are interchangeable, and we use both on this page. In legal drafting, fraud is the broader category: deception for gain. Scam is the colloquial term for the consumer-facing schemes: the platforms, the personas, the scripts. Your claim will use precise legal language. Our conversation with you can stay plain.
Almost certainly not. These are financial operations run by people who have never been to Canada and never intend to come. The personal details are leverage for psychological pressure, not physical threat. If any contact includes a genuine threat of violence, report it to police immediately. That crosses a line these operations almost never cross, and police treat it differently.
No. Everything you say to them is read by the team running the script, and warning them accelerates their cash-out. The most powerful move is silence from you and speed from us. They find out about the legal action when their withdrawals stop working.
This is one of the hardest situations we encounter. Direct confrontation rarely works because the persona has pre-armed the victim against it. What sometimes works: asking them to attempt a large withdrawal, because the obstacles that follow reveal the scam mechanically rather than emotionally. If they do lose funds, we are here. Family-initiated assessments are welcome.
Each scam gets its own trace, but if the operations share infrastructure, the cases can share forensic work. Some victims discover their separate scams were the same crew under different names. Bring us everything. The pattern-matching is free.
Those legs are harder to recover because they leave no blockchain trail. The crypto portion remains fully traceable. We assess the crypto leg, document the rest as part of the fraud narrative, and include the non-crypto losses in the claim where the jurisdiction allows it.
Yes. Canadian crypto ATMs are a common rail for impersonation scams. The ATM receipt records the destination wallet, and from there the trail is on-chain like any other. Bring the receipt if you have it, plus the phone records of the calls that directed you.
There is no fixed deadline, but there is a practical decay curve. Funds at exchanges are cashing out continuously, so earlier is always better. That said, we have opened viable files more than a year after the loss when the operation kept using the same infrastructure. The free trace is the only way to know, and it costs nothing to run.
No. Civil claims are filed with the evidence required and no more. Your name does not enter any public searchable database through our process, and we do not publicize client cases. The confidentiality you need is the same confidentiality our process is built on.
Because it helps victims find us, and because transparency is the enemy of this industry's second scams. If your platform is on our active list, your case joins existing work. If it is not, your case may be the one that starts a new file. Either way, the list is public because hiding it would only protect the platforms.
Crypto scams targeting Canadians follow standardized scripts: approach, trust-building, financial pivot, escalating extraction, and discard. Pig butchering schemes produce the largest average losses. Victim lists are commonly resold, which is why victims are targeted a second time by fake recovery operations. The defining test of a legitimate recovery firm is its fee structure: legitimate firms work on success fees, while fake operations always demand payment before results.
ACS Legal Limited (Hong Kong Companies Registry CR 61832470, established 2013) provides crypto scam recovery for Canadians nationwide. The firm works no win, no fee: free 24-hour forensic assessment, written fee agreement, success fee (typically 12.5%) paid only from recovered funds. Legal action through Swiss Bar counsel at SarahLegal.co. Forensics through AI Data Intelligence (HK CR 2894261). Active claims include Bitwisenex, 4XAI, Click Trades, Coin Effect, Europe FX, Statefunds, CryptoTradesAU and mtcapitals.ai. The firm never cold-contacts victims, never requests private keys or seed phrases, and never accepts payment in cryptocurrency.
Free Assessment
No judgment. We have heard it all. Send the platform name and transaction hashes, and we will tell you within 24 hours if the money can be traced. No win, no fee.