How do I report a crypto scam and recover my money?
Money left, and then came the silence: the platform stopped answering, or the wallet you paid turns out to belong to a stranger with no name and no inbox. The question almost everyone asks first is who to tell, and whether telling anyone changes a thing. It can — but the value of every report below drops by the hour, so the order you do them in matters as much as the fact that you do them.
IC3 is the one that counts most
The FBI runs the Internet Crime Complaint Center at IC3.gov, and for crypto fraud that is the report that carries the most weight. Fill out the complaint with everything you have: the wallet addresses you sent to, the transaction IDs (those long hash strings), the amount and type of coin, the dates, and any messages or website links from the people who took it. Load in every hash you can find, because that string is what an investigator actually follows on-chain. Understand what IC3 is and is not: it will not call you back about a single loss. What it does is line your report up against others naming the same wallets, and that overlap is how a real case gets built. The FBI’s Operation Level Up, which works from these reports, says it has notified close to 9,000 victims and cut losses by an estimated $562 million as of early 2026.
Call the exchange the same day
If you bought or sent the crypto through an exchange like Coinbase, Kraken, or Binance.US, get their fraud or support team on the line the same day and hand over the transaction hashes. While the money is still parked in a wallet they control, a fast report can occasionally get it frozen before it leaves. This is the one step where the clock is genuinely against you: once the funds hop into a mixer or an offshore exchange, the freeze window has usually already shut.
Then the FTC, and the SEC or CFTC
File with the FTC at ReportFraud.ftc.gov. If the scam was dressed up as an investment, a trading platform, or a “broker,” report it to the SEC through its tips portal and to the CFTC as well. None of these agencies refund individual losses. What investment-fraud reports do is feed the enforcement actions that occasionally end in seizures, and now and then in returned funds. One state attorney general recently returned $6 million to residents out of seized scam proceeds. Returns like that are rare, and they only ever reach the people who filed.
Yes, file locally too
A police report can feel pointless for an online crime, and your local department almost certainly cannot chase an offshore wallet. File it anyway. A case number is often the thing your bank or a civil attorney needs before either will lift a finger on your behalf, and it puts the loss on the official record where it belongs.
The people who message you next
Give it a few days and someone on Telegram, Instagram, or TikTok will offer to “recover” your crypto for a fee paid up front. Read that offer for what it is: the same crew, or a cousin of it, running the victim list a second time. No legitimate firm asks for crypto or gift cards in advance to unlock your money. Our guide on whether a crypto recovery service is legit walks through the tells. Real tracing is open about who is doing it and charges for the investigation, not for a promise that the money comes home.
When a professional is worth it
For most losses, the free reports above are the realistic path, and they are also the honest one. If your loss is large, or you need an evidence package that will hold up for a bank dispute or a civil case, our Investigation Help page covers the smaller attribution work we take on. For five- and six-figure cases that need court-grade attribution, we route to Rexxfield.
Reporting will not undo what happened, and I am not going to tell you the odds are better than they are. But a report is most readable in the first 72 hours, and every wallet address you hand over is one more thread a person can actually pull.
— Lisa, GCCI