Every crypto scam follows
a recognisable pattern.
Recovery starts with identifying which pattern took your money. Each hub below covers a major category we see in our case files, with documented examples from our public registry and a step-by-step guide to recovery.
Romance scams (pig butchering)
Romance-to-investment scams (commonly called "pig butchering" inside law-enforcement circles) are the single highest-loss crypto-fraud category globally. They combine weeks or months of emotional manipulation with a poli…
Fake investment / trading platforms
Fake investment and trading platforms are the largest category in our public registry. They present as legitimate brokers, often with claims of FCA, SEC, or BaFin authorisation that turn out to be invented. The deposit-t…
Frozen withdrawals & "release fee" extortion
Withdrawal-block schemes are the extraction phase that follows almost every other crypto-fraud pattern. The deposit phase already took your principal; the withdrawal-block phase is designed to extract additional money fr…
Wallet drains & phishing approvals
Wallet drain attacks differ from investment-platform fraud because there's no platform to recover from — the attacker stole approval to move funds directly out of the victim's wallet, often through a single malicious sig…
Recovery scams (second-stage fraud)
Recovery scams are the most cynical category in this space. The operators specifically target victims of prior cryptocurrency fraud, knowing those victims are emotionally invested in recovering their original loss and th…