Most guides tell you to report and wait. That is step two of four, and waiting alone recovers nothing. Here is the full process, in order, based on how real recoveries happen. No win, no fee. $0 upfront.
Before anything else, lock down what you have. Copy every transaction ID from your wallet or exchange history. Screenshot the platform, your account balance, and every conversation with the scammer. Export the chat logs if you can.
Then stop. Do not send another cent, no matter what they promise. The "tax," the "unlock fee," the "verification deposit" are all the same scam reaching for a second bite. Every dollar you send now makes recovery harder.
File a police report. In Canada, also report to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. In the UK, Action Fraud. In Australia, ReportCyber. Get a file number.
Understand what this step does and does not do. Reporting creates an official record that strengthens later legal action. It does not freeze anything. Police almost never have the jurisdiction or the tools to lock an offshore crypto wallet. That is not their failure. It is simply not how the system is built.
This is where recovery actually begins. Your coins did not vanish. They moved from your wallet to the scammer's wallet, and from there through a chain of addresses that is recorded forever.
A forensic trace follows that chain to its current resting point. If your Bitcoin, Ethereum or USDT is sitting at an exchange, a custodian or any service with a compliance department, you have a freeze point. If it went through mixers into a cold wallet that never touches the regulated world, you have a hard truth instead of false hope.
We run this trace for free, in 24 hours, because everything else depends on what it shows.
With a freeze point identified, legal counsel serves a freeze request at the exchange holding the assets. Properly documented requests from registered legal entities get action. Victim emails to support get templates.
The freeze holds the money in place. The legal claim, filed in the right jurisdiction with the forensic evidence attached, turns that freeze into a court-ordered return. Recovered funds land in your bank account or your own wallet.
That is the whole process. Four steps. The first two you can do yourself. The last two are what we do, no win, no fee.
Recovery cases are won on evidence, and evidence degrades fast. Platforms go offline, chats auto-delete, and memory fades. This section is the full preservation protocol we give every client, expanded so you can start it tonight, before you even contact us.
Find every transaction ID connected to the loss. In your exchange account, open the withdrawal or send history and copy the full transaction hash for each transfer to the scammer. Screenshot the list as backup. If you used a self-custody wallet, open the wallet's transaction history and do the same. Include the receiving addresses, the amounts, and the dates. This data is permanent on the blockchain, but your convenient access to it is not, especially if the exchange account is later closed or the device is lost.
Export every conversation with the scammer or platform: WhatsApp, Telegram, SMS, email, dating app messages, social media DMs. Most apps have an export function. Where export is impossible, screenshot methodically from the first message to the last, including the contact's profile page, phone number and username. Do not edit, crop or annotate the captures. Courts and exchanges want originals, and edited images create credibility problems that scammers' lawyers exploit.
If the platform is still online, capture everything now: the dashboard showing your balance, the deposit and withdrawal pages, the terms of service, the about page, the support chat, and the URL itself. Record the domain registration details using any public WHOIS lookup. Platforms vanish without warning, and a vanished platform takes its pages with it. Web archives sometimes hold copies, but your own captures are better.
Gather the bank statements showing the fiat transfers that funded your crypto purchases, and the exchange records showing the purchases themselves. This chain, bank to exchange to blockchain, proves the assets were yours, which is a required element of any legal claim. If you borrowed money or used credit, keep those records too. They document the full scale of the loss.
Do not confront the scammer, because warning them accelerates their cash-out. Do not pay any "tax" or "unlock fee," because it is another theft, not a key to your funds. Do not hire anyone who contacts you first, because legitimate firms do not cold-call victims. Do not delete anything in anger, because partial evidence beats no evidence. And do not wait for emotional readiness before preserving evidence, because the scammer's schedule does not wait for yours.
Cut all contact with the scammer without announcing it. If any wallet or exchange account of yours was ever connected to a platform they gave you, revoke token approvals and move remaining funds to a fresh wallet. Change passwords on your email and exchange accounts, and enable hardware-based two-factor authentication where available. Scammers sometimes hold access victims never gave them knowingly.
File with your national fraud center: the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre in Canada, Action Fraud in the UK, ReportCyber in Australia, the FBI's IC3 in the United States. File a local police report as well and keep the file number. These reports rarely recover money directly, but they create dated, official records that strengthen every later legal step, and they feed the intelligence picture that helps shut operations down.
Send your transaction IDs to a legitimate recovery firm for assessment. Ours runs free in 24 hours. The trace answers the only question that matters at this stage: did your coins reach a point where the law can act? Roughly seven in ten cases we review show a viable freeze point. The verdict costs nothing either way.
For viable cases, legal counsel files preservation requests and freezing orders targeting the exchange or custodian holding the assets. Major exchanges maintain legal process teams for exactly this. Once served, the account locks. The scammer discovers the freeze the next time they try to withdraw, which is also the moment they learn someone is coming.
Court orders compel the exchange to identify the account holder and produce their records. The substantive claim follows: fraud, unjust enrichment, or a proprietary claim asserting the assets remain legally yours. If the operation is already known to us, your claim joins a group action and this phase compresses significantly.
The court orders release of the frozen assets. Funds convert and transfer to your bank account or your own wallet. The success fee comes out of the recovery, never your pocket. Simple cases close in two to four months. Contested multi-jurisdiction files take longer, and we tell you at the start which track yours is on.
Every week we hear from victims who spent months trying to recover funds themselves. Understanding why those efforts fail explains what professional recovery actually adds.
Victims write to exchanges explaining they were scammed and asking for their money back. Exchanges respond with policy language and close the ticket. This is not cruelty. It is structure: an exchange cannot freeze a customer's account on the word of a stranger, because that power would be abused instantly. What exchanges do respond to is legal process from verifiable legal entities, because their licenses and banking relationships depend on honoring it. The difference between your email and our filing is not persuasion. It is legal standing.
Even when victims trace their own coins to an exchange deposit address, they hit the second wall: the exchange will not reveal the account holder to a private individual. Privacy law forbids it. Disclosure orders exist precisely for this situation, and only legal counsel can obtain them. The pseudonymous scammer stays pseudonymous until a court says otherwise.
DIY efforts consume the scarcest resource in recovery: time. Every week spent drafting emails to exchange support is a week the operation uses to cash out. Professional recovery is not smarter than you. It is faster, because the forensic tools, the legal templates and the exchange relationships already exist. The 24-hour assessment is what that infrastructure looks like from the client's side.
Secure what remains: move any untouched funds to a fresh wallet, revoke token approvals on any platform the scammer gave you, and change your email and exchange passwords. Then preserve evidence: transaction IDs, chats, platform screenshots. Then start the trace. In that order.
Yes. Recovery targets the assets, not the person. The trace finds where the coins sit, the freeze locks them there, and disclosure orders unmask the account holder afterward. Many successful cases begin against persons unknown and name defendants later.
In an exchange account, open your withdrawal or send history and look for the transaction hash or TxID on each transfer. In a self-custody wallet, open the transaction details for each send. The hash is a long string of letters and numbers. Copy the full string. If you cannot find them, send us what you have and we will walk you through it.
These cases are traceable like any other. Malicious approvals, drained liquidity and exploit transactions all live on public chains. The recovery path depends on where the funds went afterward. Exploits that cash out through centralized exchanges are actionable. Funds that stay in the DeFi wild are harder, and we will tell you which you have.
Never. The tax, verification fee, or anti-money-laundering deposit is the scam's final extraction. Paying it releases nothing and adds to your loss. The moment a platform conditions withdrawal on a fresh payment, the fraud is confirmed. Stop paying, preserve the demand as evidence, and start the trace.
Usually yes. A receiving address lets us search the ledger for inbound transactions and match them to your transfers by amount and date. Transaction IDs make it faster and cleaner, but an address plus your exchange records is often enough to reconstruct the trail.
Lower, but not zero. The question is not the calendar. It is where the coins are now. Operations that cash out slowly, or that keep using the same infrastructure, leave recoverable trails for years. The free trace answers this for your specific case in 24 hours, at no cost.
No, and a local lawyer alone usually cannot help, because the assets are offshore. Recovery requires forensic tracing plus legal action where the assets sit, which is why our structure pairs Hong Kong forensic coordination with Swiss Bar counsel at SarahLegal.co. Your location affects nothing about what we can trace or freeze.
With us, zero. The assessment is free, the agreement is no win no fee, and the success fee applies only to funds that actually reach your account. A failed case costs you nothing but the time it took to try, and you will know the outcome was honest.
Apply three tests to anyone offering help. Do they have a verifiable company registration you can check yourself? Is the fee structure written down, with no upfront payment? Do they ever ask for private keys, seed phrases or crypto deposits? Legitimate firms pass all three. Ours: HK CR 61832470, written no win no fee terms, and we never ask for keys.
Stolen cryptocurrency is recoverable when it reaches a regulated endpoint such as an exchange, because that endpoint can be served with legal process. The standard recovery sequence is: preserve evidence, report to national fraud authorities, run a forensic trace, freeze assets at the endpoint, obtain disclosure orders, file the recovery claim, and enforce the return. The critical variable is speed, because scam operations cash out continuously. DIY recovery typically fails because exchanges respond to legal process from verifiable entities, not to individual complaints.
ACS Legal Limited (Hong Kong Companies Registry CR 61832470, established 2013) recovers stolen cryptocurrency for clients in Canada, the UK, Australia and more than 20 other countries. 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). The firm never requests private keys, seed phrases or upfront payment.
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Send your transaction IDs. We will trace your coins within 24 hours and tell you if a freeze point exists. No win, no fee. $0 upfront.