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What to do after a crypto scam
Pick the situation that fits. You get an ordered list — what to do in the next hour, what to preserve, who to report to, and the things not to do next. That last section matters more than it sounds: a second loss can follow from what people do in the days after the first one.
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What is realistically possible after a loss
Read this before anything else on the page
Nothing here is legal advice, and we cannot recover funds for anyone. Neither can any company that contacts you about your loss. If you take one thing from this page, take that sentence — it is the difference between one loss and two.
What is realistically recoverable
Being straight about this is kinder than being encouraging. A crypto transfer that has confirmed on a blockchain is final; there is no mechanism that reverses it, and no service has a private channel that changes this. What can sometimes happen is different: if funds reach a regulated exchange, that exchange can freeze an account when law enforcement asks. That path runs through the police and the exchange's compliance team, not through you, and it depends on the funds not having moved on.
Money that left a bank account or card is a different matter, and the odds are better. Chargebacks and recalls exist, the windows are short, and speed genuinely matters. This is the one place where acting within hours rather than days can change the outcome.
Why the "what not to do" section is the important one
Second-stage approaches are a pattern the US Federal Trade Commission specifically warns about (checked October 2026). Someone who has just lost money is identifiable — often from a public complaint — motivated, and used to sending payments. Approaches offering recovery arrive with case numbers, portals showing progress, and letters that look official. They ask for a fee up front, and then another.
The rule that closes all of it: nobody who contacts you unsolicited about your loss is going to recover anything, regardless of what they show you.
Why reporting is worth the time even when nothing comes back
A report may not get your own money back, and it is still worth doing. Reports are how patterns become visible, how firms get onto regulators' warning lists, and how the larger cases get built — those are assembled from many small reports of the same operation. Banks and insurers may also ask for a police report number before they will act.
Preserving evidence, and why now
Platforms disappear. Conversations get deleted from the other side. Accounts are closed and the balance you screenshotted becomes unverifiable. Anything you can capture in the first hour is worth more than anything you try to reconstruct in the first month. Transaction hashes and addresses should be copied rather than retyped, because a single wrong character makes them useless.
The part nobody puts in a checklist
A loss like this tends to leave people feeling stupid. They are usually not — these structures are run by people who do this professionally, and the approaches are rehearsed and refined. Embarrassment is what keeps victims quiet, and quiet is what keeps the operation working.
Telling one person you trust is a practical step, not an emotional one. It gets a second perspective onto anything that comes next, at exactly the moment when a second perspective is most valuable.
Last checked October 15, 2026. This is a thinking aid, not a verdict, and nothing it prints is legal or investment advice. Corrections go to the desk.