Cryptocurrency reports frequently fail not because the case is weak but because the submission contains nothing anyone can act on. Exchanges and investigators work with addresses and transaction hashes; they cannot do anything with a photograph of a balance on a platform that has since disappeared.

What to capture, exactly

  • Every transaction hash for funds you sent, copied as text.
  • The destination address for each transaction, copied as text.
  • The sending address or exchange account the funds left from.
  • Date, time, asset, and amount for each transfer.
  • The platform URL, app name, and any company details claimed.

Copy, do not photograph

Addresses and hashes are long strings where a single wrong character makes them useless, and photographs invite transcription errors. Copy them as text into a document. If you sent from an exchange, export your transaction history — most provide a CSV that contains everything needed in a form investigators can process directly.

Trace the destination before you report

Paste the destination address into a public block explorer for that chain. You can see whether funds moved onward and where. If they landed at an address clustered to a known exchange, that exchange becomes the highest-value report you can make, because it is the only party that can freeze a balance still in custody.

Reporting to an exchange

Use the exchange's official fraud or compliance channel. Provide the hashes, the destination address, the timeline, and your police or agency report reference. Exchanges cannot reverse transactions, and they can freeze accounts that still hold funds pending a law enforcement request — which is why speed matters so much here.

Set expectations honestly

Funds sent directly to a private wallet and moved onward are frequently unrecoverable. That is the accurate position, and it is better stated plainly than implied otherwise. Documentation still matters: it supports enforcement against the operation, and it is what any legitimate future process would depend on. Anyone offering guaranteed crypto recovery for an upfront fee is running the second-wave fraud described elsewhere in this library.

Secure what remains

If any wallet you control interacted with the fraudulent platform, move remaining assets to a newly created wallet rather than attempting to secure the existing one, then revoke outstanding token approvals on the old address.