You lost crypto. Start with what can be shown.
If digital assets left your control, the transactions that moved them are public. Whether that leads anywhere useful depends on where the funds went — and that is a question with a real answer.
Should you hire a crypto recovery service?
Before hiring a crypto recovery service, report the theft to IC3 and your local police. That costs nothing and is often a precondition for any later action by an exchange or prosecutor. A legitimate service then assesses whether tracing can produce anything useful for the case, and says so plainly when it cannot.
What you are actually trying to establish.
What we bring to it
A free assessment first. Before any fee, we tell you whether blockchain analysis can produce anything useful in your situation.
A trace you can verify. Every hop cites a transaction you can check yourself on a public explorer.
Documentation you can hand over. A report in a form a lawyer, an exchange or a police unit can actually work from.
An honest answer about recovery. We never promise it, because nobody can deliver it.
The shape of a typical engagement.
Submit what you have
A transaction hash, an address, a date and what happened. Nothing more is required to start.
Triage
We assess whether analysis can help. If it cannot, that is what you are told, at no cost.
Assessment
Preliminary findings, scope and price. You decide whether to proceed.
Investigation
Tracing and analysis within the agreed scope.
Report
Findings, method and limitations, in writing.
Next steps
What the findings actually support: counsel, an exchange approach, a police report, or monitoring.
What this will not do for you.
Every page on this site states its limits. If a vendor will not write this section for their own product, that absence is itself information.
Unsolicited contact after a loss is the single most common fraud pattern in this market. We never contact people out of the blue about losses, and we never ask for seed phrases, private keys, device access, or a payment to release funds. Read our scam guidance before you reply to anybody.
The assessment is free, so you can find out whether an investigation is even worth running without committing anything. If the numbers do not justify an investigation, we will say so.
Tell us anyway. Small losses often sit alongside many others at the same addresses, and that aggregate picture is sometimes worth more to a police report than any single case.
Before you pay anyone, report the theft.
Reporting is free, it takes minutes, and it is the step most likely to matter. Do it before you engage us or any other investigator. A tracing report is far more useful to an exchange or a prosecutor when a formal complaint already exists to attach it to.
FBI IC3
The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. The primary US route for crypto theft and fraud. File here even if the amount feels small — IC3 aggregates reports, and clusters get investigated.
FTC ReportFraud
The Federal Trade Commission’s fraud reporting service. Covers scams, impersonation and investment fraud, and feeds a database used by law enforcement across the US.
CFTC
The Commodity Futures Trading Commission. The right route where the loss involves crypto derivatives, leveraged trading or a fraudulent trading platform.
SEC
The Securities and Exchange Commission. Use this where the asset or scheme was presented as an investment, a token sale or a fund.
Your local police
File a report in your own jurisdiction and keep the reference number. Banks, exchanges and insurers frequently require it, and it is often the precondition for any formal request to a service.
Report to your national fraud or cybercrime body and to your local police. If a card or bank transfer was involved at any point, contact your bank immediately — that is the one channel where speed can still change the outcome.
Blockchain analysis establishes where funds went and whether an intervention point exists. Whether anything is recovered depends on where the funds landed, how quickly you acted, and whether a cooperating exchange or authority sits at the end of the path. Read exactly what we can and cannot do, and how to spot a recovery scam before you pay anybody.