Already lost crypto? You are now the target.
People who have lost digital assets are the most heavily targeted group in this market. The second loss is often larger than the first, and it usually arrives dressed as help.
How do you identify a legitimate crypto recovery company?
A legitimate crypto recovery company never guarantees recovery, never asks for a seed phrase or private key, never charges an upfront fee to “release” funds, and never makes first contact about a loss that was not reported to it. Any one of those behaviours is sufficient reason to stop the conversation immediately.
Any one of these should stop the conversation.
A guarantee of recovery
Nobody can guarantee it. Not us, not a lawyer, not a government agency. A guarantee is the clearest single indicator of fraud.
A request for your seed phrase
There is no legitimate reason for anybody to need it. Handing it over transfers everything, immediately and irreversibly.
An upfront fee to 'release' funds
A tax, a bond, a gas fee, a compliance charge — the label varies, the pattern does not. Legitimate services do not require payment to release your own funds.
Contact you did not initiate
A message, call or comment offering to recover funds you never reported to that party. Legitimate firms do not cold-contact victims.
Urgency and secrecy
‘The window closes today.’ ‘Do not tell your bank.’ Pressure exists to stop you checking.
Fake credentials
Invented licence numbers, borrowed logos, cloned websites, staff photographs that appear elsewhere under other names.
Four checks, in this order.
Stop replying
Do not continue the conversation while you check. Nothing legitimate expires while you verify it.
Go to the source yourself
Type the company's address into your browser yourself. Do not use a link, a number or an address from the message.
Use published contact details
Contact the organisation through details published on its own site, and ask whether the person is theirs.
Ask for the limits
Ask directly: 'What can you not do?' A legitimate investigator answers that clearly. A fraud deflects it.
How to be sure a message is from ChainwatchCrypto.
Sign in to your account directly and check your messages there instead. If a message exists, it will be in your case. If it does not, the email was not from us — forward it to security@chainwatchcrypto.com and delete it.
Report it. We would rather chase an impersonator than have somebody lose money to one using our name.
It is common, it is not your fault, and there are still useful steps.
Stop all payments
Send nothing further, whatever is threatened or promised.
Preserve everything
Screenshots, addresses, transaction hashes, emails, phone numbers, website addresses, chat logs. Keep it all.
Report it
To your national fraud reporting body and, if a card or bank transfer was involved, to your bank immediately.
Secure your accounts
Change passwords, enable multi-factor authentication, and move assets to a wallet whose keys were never shared.
Get the second loss traced
The recovery-scam payment is usually recent, which makes it more traceable than the original loss.
Be sceptical of the next offer
Victims of recovery fraud are frequently approached again by the same operation under a new name.
How to find a legitimate crypto recovery company
People searching for the best cryptocurrency recovery company are usually reading listicles that were paid for. Here is what to look at instead.
There is no meaningful ranking of the best crypto recovery services, because the lists that claim to provide one are almost entirely paid placement — and several rank operations that do not exist as legal entities. Reviews are equally unreliable: fabricating them is trivial, and reclaim-stolen-crypto review pages are frequently run by the firms they praise.
Legitimate crypto recovery companies are identifiable by behaviour rather than reputation. They publish what they cannot do, they refuse to guarantee outcomes, they charge for investigation rather than for releasing funds, and they turn away cases that cannot work. Those four tests exclude nearly every operation advertising to fraud victims, and they cost nothing to apply.
Is free crypto recovery real?
The free parts are real and you should use them: reporting to IC3, the FTC and your local police costs nothing, and a reputable firm’s initial assessment should also be free. Investigation itself is skilled work and is not free. Anyone offering free recovery of funds is setting up a fee later.
Investment loss recovery groups
Firms offering to recover investment losses operate under the same rules. If the offer arrived unsolicited, involves an upfront fee, or promises recovery, it is a scam rather than a remedy.
Checking a company in the USA or anywhere else
Jurisdiction changes the register you check, not the criteria. Verify the entity exists, verify the domain is not a near-miss clone, and contact the firm through details published on its own site rather than any link you were sent.
Apply the framework yourself
Nine criteria you can run on any firm, including us, with our own worst score stated. The evaluation framework.
Questions people ask before they pay anyone.
There is no defensible answer to that, and any list claiming one is almost certainly paid placement. Best cryptocurrency recovery services rankings are sold, not earned, and several published lists include operations that do not exist as registered entities. Apply criteria instead of trusting a ranking: no guarantee, published limits, a scoped fee rather than a release fee, and a willingness to decline unsuitable cases.
Treat them as unverified. Review pages in this category are cheap to fabricate and are frequently operated by the firms they praise, or by affiliates paid per referral. A review tells you what someone wrote; the four behavioural tests above tell you how a firm actually operates.
The same rules apply whether the loss was crypto, a trading platform or a fund. If an investment loss recovery group contacted you first, asks for payment before establishing feasibility, or promises an outcome, it is the second fraud rather than the remedy.