Can stolen crypto be recovered?

Occasionally, and only through free routes. Everyone who contacts you offering it for a fee is stealing from you again.

Honest answer: usually not. Recovery requires the funds to reach a regulated platform that can freeze an account, in a jurisdiction where a case can be brought, quickly enough to matter. That happens, but it is the exception.

Tracing coins across a public ledger is genuinely possible — anyone can do it in a block explorer. Tracing does not return anything. Only a custodian freezing an account and a legal process do.

Everything worth doing is free: report to the police in your country, report to the exchange the funds reached with the transaction hash and timestamp, report to your financial regulator.

Within days somebody will offer to recover it — an investigator, a lawyer, an agency, a "compensation programme". Lists of fresh victims are bought and sold, which is how they know. Every one of them is the second theft.

If your funds are gone and the second scam.

Last checked 19 Oct 2026.