Not in the order most people do them. Steps 2, 3 and 4 run in parallel — waiting for one to finish before starting the next is how the first week gets spent, and the first week is the one that matters.
Transaction hashes, the addresses you sent to, amounts and dates, the site or person you dealt with, how contact started, screenshots of every conversation. Do not delete the chat, do not “clean up” your wallet — a report you can evidence is worth ten you cannot.
In the US that is the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3); other countries have their own portals — the table below. The report costs nothing and builds the official record.
This is the step people skip, and it is the one that matters most for recovery: in our casework, a police report is typically what turns a provisional freeze at an exchange into a formal block. File it even if your local police seem unfamiliar with crypto.
Through its official support or compliance channel, with the hashes and addresses attached. Exchanges act on evidence, not on distress — a freeze request with a proper evidence pack takes 2–4 days to process.
Reporting is free; a professional investigation is not, and below a certain size it cannot pay for itself. The assessment costs nothing and includes the answer that there is nothing worth investigating.
The first four cost nothing and need nobody’s permission. Only the fifth involves hiring anyone, and what that actually consists of is set out step by step on the recovery process page.
The national channel, and what it is for. Every destination below is a government page; none of them charges anything, and none of them will contact you first.
| Where you are | Report to |
|---|---|
| United States | IC3 is the main channel for crypto fraud; the FTC report adds the consumer-protection record |
| United Kingdom | National reporting centre for fraud and cybercrime |
| Canada | Plus your local police service |
| Australia | Run by the ACCC; police report separately |
| EU / elsewhere | Your national police cybercrime unit. There is no single EU-wide portal — the local police report is the one that counts |
| Everyone, everywhere | The exchange or platform the funds moved through — official support/compliance channel, evidence attached |
The local police report is the document that legal process builds on. The portals create records and feed investigations; the police report is what a court or a compliance team will ask for, and the canon behind our own timings puts the formal block two to three days after one exists.
Both halves matter. The first is why the four free steps above are worth an afternoon; the second is why nobody should be sold a report as a recovery.
What it does: creates the official record your case will need at every later stage; feeds pattern-level investigations that take large operations down; and — the part that matters for getting money back — a police report typically converts a provisional freeze at an exchange into a formal block, which is the difference between funds being held and funds moving on.
What it does not do: reporting alone rarely returns money by itself. Recovery in practice runs through freezes — at exchanges, 2–4 days on a proper evidence pack; at stablecoin issuers, a response in 24 to 62 hours through the issuer’s official procedure — and then through legal process, which is measured in months, not days.
Anyone telling you that a report, or a fee, will bring the money back within days is describing a freeze at best. Freezing is not repayment, and the gap between the two is where this industry does most of its lying. The timings we publish, with the dates they were measured, are on the data page.
This is the single most likely thing to happen to you in the next few weeks, and it is the reason this section is on a reporting page rather than only on a page about us.
The FBI’s IC3 has warned repeatedly about fraudsters who target people who have just reported a scam — posing as law firms or “recovery agencies”, claiming to work with the FBI or another agency, and asking for an up-front fee. The advisories are public: PSA240624 and PSA250813.
No agency refers cases to private firms — not to us, not to anyone. We never contact victims first. If someone approaches you in our name, it is not us: report them too. Being contacted is the warning sign, not what the message says.
Before you hire anyone — including us — run the ten-point checklist on our verification page. It is written so that you can check every claim without contacting a single company, and it filters out most of the market in minutes. Our own registry entries are published in full on credentials.
A report an investigator can work from and a report that sits in a queue differ by about twenty minutes of preparation.
| Item | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Transaction hashes | The single most useful item — they let an investigator follow the funds on-chain |
| Receiving addresses | Every address you sent to, exactly as used |
| Amounts, assets, dates | Per transaction, not as one total |
| The platform or person | Site URL, app name, usernames, phone numbers — however they appeared to you |
| How contact started | Ad, message, dating app, “wrong number” — the entry vector identifies the scheme |
| Screenshots of conversations | Keep originals; do not crop out metadata |
This is the same material a professional investigation starts from — if you later engage a forensics firm, having it organised saves days. What is done with it, and what a trace can and cannot establish, is on crypto tracing.
For most losses, the four free steps above are the whole of what can sensibly be done. For some, they are the beginning.
If the loss is significant and the funds are traceable, a report is not the end of the case: someone still has to follow the funds to a service that can freeze them, put an evidence pack in front of that service, and carry the matter through legal process. That is what a crypto recovery service does, and ours assesses cases free of charge, answers within two business hours, and declines cases with no realistic path rather than selling hope. Our published threshold is a loss from $200,000; smaller cases are reviewed individually.
Which kind of scam you are dealing with changes what is recoverable and how fast you have to move — the six patterns and what each one leaves behind are set out on the scam typologies. If you would rather speak to a person first, every channel we answer on is on the contact page, and nothing is charged or signed at the assessment stage.
Founder and CEO, StarCompliance · blockchain investigations since 2022 · interviewed by ForkLog, 23 July 2024 · on Bitcoin.com News, 30 April 2025 · LinkedIn. The registry record behind that name is on credentials, and every external mention of it on press.
Reviewed by: compliance reviewer — not named: no reviewer profile has been supplied. We would rather name nobody than name someone we have not asked.
Disclaimer. This page is informational and is not legal advice. Reporting channels were checked against the government pages themselves on 8 September 2026 and may change — always start from the official government domain for your country. Outcomes in asset recovery depend on courts, exchanges and token issuers, and no outcome is promised. StarCompliance does not practise law; legal steps are executed by admitted lawyers in the relevant jurisdiction.