These are the questions to ask crypto recovery firm by firm — what an experienced investigator looks for, how you can check it yourself in a few minutes, and what you find when you check it on us. Run the same ten on anyone else you are considering; the difference between a legitimate crypto recovery vs scam operation shows up in minutes.
01
A named legal entity with a licence number you can look up
How to check: A legitimate firm publishes the exact registered name, licence or registration number and the issuing registry — not just a brand and a city. If a site names only a trading brand, or the entity is registered in a jurisdiction with no public registry, treat everything else on the site as unverified.
StarCompliance
Registered as STAR COMPLIANCE CYBER RISK MANAGEMENT SERVICES L.L.C, Dubai, UAE. Commercial licence No. 1135542 (register No. 1876962, DCCI No. 439332), issued 12 January 2023, valid to 11 January 2027. Sole owner and manager: Taras Podhorodetskyi. Registered address: One Central, Dubai World Trade Centre, Dubai, UAE. The company has been operating since 2022 and has been licensed in Dubai since January 2023 — we state both dates rather than the more flattering one.
02
Real people, with names, faces and qualifications
How to check: Open the team page and search each name outside the site — LinkedIn, conference programmes, media interviews. Stock photos, first-names-only, or a team that exists nowhere else on the internet is the single most common tell of a fake recovery firm.
StarCompliance · partially answered today
Our founder and CEO, Taras Podhorodetskyi, is public and verifiable: interviewed by ForkLog (July 2024), speaker at WOW Summit 2024, LinkedIn and X profiles linked from this site. Additional investigator and reviewer profiles are being published in the next update of this page — until they are, this point is only partially answered, and we say so rather than filling the page with stock photos.
03
A physical address and a phone that a human answers
How to check: Call the number and look up the address. Messenger-only contact — a Telegram handle and nothing else — is how recovery scams stay unreachable after payment.
StarCompliance
Office: One Central, Dubai World Trade Centre, Dubai, UAE. Phone: +971 56 182 9077. Email: [email protected]. There is a Google Business Profile for the Dubai office, and the licence above ties the company to that address in a public registry.
04
No promise of recovery — from anyone, at any stage
How to check: Search the site for the words "guaranteed return", "100% recovery", "we will get your money back". Whether funds come back is decided by a court, an exchange or a token issuer — never by the firm you hire. Any promise of an outcome is a red flag on its own, and it is the promise that regulators and the FBI point to when they describe recovery fraud.
StarCompliance
We never promise an outcome, and we do not use the word "guaranteed" anywhere on this site or in a contract. What we can say factually: once a freeze is officially confirmed, the odds improve sharply, and our measured figure on accepted cases is 68% over the past 24 months. If your case has no realistic path to recovery, we say so at the assessment stage and decline it.
05
Terms in writing before you pay anything — and nothing added afterwards
How to check: Finding out whether your case is workable should cost nothing, and everything you would owe should be set out in a written agreement you can read before you commit — not described in a conversation after you have paid. Watch specifically for repeat payments: a scam pattern is a small first fee, then a "court fee", "tax", or "unlock fee" each time you get close to the money.
StarCompliance
The case assessment and the first call are free, and you get an answer within two business hours — including the answer "this cannot be recovered", which is the honest one in a meaningful share of enquiries. Commercial terms are fixed in the engagement agreement before any work begins: you see them in writing, in full, together with the scope of the work and what happens if nothing is recovered. Once a case is open we never add a charge to release funds — there is no "court fee", no "tax" and no "unlock payment" from us at any stage.
06
Timelines that separate freezing from returning
How to check: Look for a site that promises money back "in 48 hours". Fast numbers in this industry describe freezing an asset; returning it to the victim runs through law enforcement, courts or an issuer's payout schedule and takes months. A site that blurs the two is either inexperienced or deliberately misleading.
StarCompliance
Our published timelines keep the two apart — the full table is in the next section. In short: flagging into AML services within 4 hours; a freeze request to an exchange takes 2–4 days; a freeze request to a stablecoin issuer gets a response in 24–62 hours; while an actual return runs 6–9 months from an exchange and 12–24 months through issuer payouts. Complex cases: 6–36 months.
07
Case evidence that exists outside the firm's own website
How to check: Testimonials on a company's own page prove nothing. Look for a case that a third party — the victim company, a court, an exchange, a news outlet — confirmed independently.
StarCompliance
Our reference case is CoinsPaid: 5,000,000 USDT recovered. The case is documented outside this site — it was covered by Bitcoin.com News, and our CEO's work has been the subject of a ForkLog interview (23 July 2024). Individual client cases are confidential; we publish only what the affected party has agreed to make public.
08
Partners who confirm the relationship on their own site
How to check: A logo wall is not a partnership. Open the partner's own website and search for the firm's name. If the relationship is real, it is documented on both sides.
StarCompliance
Two partnerships are confirmed publicly by the partners themselves: Global Ledger (announced on their blog, 22 September 2025, with a quote from our CEO) and BitOK (data exchange and client access to their KYT tooling). We do not claim a "direct channel" to any token issuer: we file freeze requests through the issuer's official procedure, and the response time we publish (24–62 hours) is the observed turnaround of that procedure.
09
A written list of what the firm refuses to do
How to check: A firm that accepts every case is selling hope, not a service. Real constraints — assets, chains, source-of-funds rules — are the clearest sign of an operation that has to answer to a regulator and to partner banks.
StarCompliance
Our limits are published in full further down this page: no Monero, no cases with an unverified source of funds, no cases without a realistic path to recovery, and we stop work if a client misrepresents the facts. We also state plainly which part of the work is ours and which is not: forensics and evidence are done in-house; legal steps are executed by partner lawyers admitted in the relevant jurisdiction, under our case management.
10
They did not contact you first
How to check: This one is about the approach, not the website. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center has warned repeatedly about fake "law firms" and recovery agents who message victims of a previous scam, claim to be working with the FBI or another agency, and ask for an up-front fee. Between February 2023 and February 2024 alone, victims re-targeted this way reported losses of more than $9.9 million.
StarCompliance
We do not cold-message victims, we are not affiliated with any government agency, and no agency refers cases to us. If someone contacts you claiming otherwise — including in our name — it is not us. Report it to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3); the relevant advisories are PSA240624 and PSA250813.