A peer-to-peer trade went wrong
Whether anything can be done depends almost entirely on one thing: was the trade inside the platform's escrow, or was it an arrangement in a chat.
- Do not release, and do not confirm receipt, until the money is in your account Not a screenshot of a transfer. Not a pending notification. Not a payment reference that has appeared. Cleared and spendable in your own account, checked in your own banking app. A screenshot of a completed transfer costs a counterparty nothing to produce.
- Open the dispute inside the platform, not in the chat Escrow only helps while the trade is open. Once it is marked complete, there is usually nothing left to hold. If the button exists, press it now and argue afterwards.
- Gather the record before anything expires Trade ID, counterparty handle, the full chat, timestamps, your own bank statement line, and the transaction hash if crypto moved. Platform chat logs are not always retained as long as a dispute takes.
- If money arrived from someone who is not your counterparty, say so immediately Report it to the platform and expect your bank to ask about it. Third-party funds are how stolen money is moved through ordinary accounts, and the person whose account it came from may well file a report naming yours.
- If the payment can be pulled back, assume it will be Card payments, some instant transfers, and anything with a chargeback route can be reversed after you have released the crypto. The crypto cannot.
- If it was outside escrow, treat it as a loss and report it A trade agreed in a chat group, settled by direct transfer, has no dispute process and no counterparty you can identify. Report it to the police in your country and to the platform where contact began, and expect recovery to be unlikely. If your funds are gone is honest about why.
Escrow is the entire product
A peer-to-peer platform is not matching you with trustworthy people. It is holding the crypto while the money moves, and releasing it when both sides have done what they said. Everything that makes P2P usable in countries where bank rails to exchanges are difficult comes from that one mechanism — which is why a trade taken outside it, at anyone's suggestion and for any stated reason, is simply a transfer to a stranger.
"Let us do this directly, the platform fee is a waste" is not a saving. It is the removal of the only protection in the transaction.
The reversible-payment trap
The structural asymmetry in every P2P trade is that fiat payments can often be undone and crypto transfers never can. A buyer pays by a method with a recall or chargeback route, the seller sees the money land and releases, and days later the payment is clawed back. The platform will side with evidence, but evidence of a payment that was later reversed is not evidence of a payment.
This is why experienced sellers insist on specific payment methods and refuse others, and why a counterparty pushing hard for a particular method is worth a pause. Buying peer to peer covers which rails behave which way.
Why third-party money is a problem even when it clears
If the funds for your trade arrive from an account belonging to someone else, two things can follow regardless of your intent. The sending account may be the subject of a fraud report, in which case your account is now part of a money trail. And your own bank, seeing an unexplained inbound payment from an unrelated party, may freeze or close the account on its own initiative — the bank path covers that side.
Declining a trade when the payer name does not match the counterparty name is not caution. It is the whole of the protection you have.
What is actually recoverable
Inside escrow, with the dispute opened before release: often most of it, slowly, through the platform's process. After release, or outside escrow: realistically nothing, and the people who will shortly offer to recover it for a fee are running the second theft. Report it anyway — a report with a transaction hash and a timestamp is what a compliance team can act on if the funds reach a regulated platform.
Anyone who contacts you offering to recover this is the next thief
It follows losses within days, sometimes hours, and it copies the names of real firms, regulators and police units. Nobody legitimate finds you first. How the recovery scam works →
Last checked 19 Oct 2026. This page is procedure, not legal advice — what a report achieves depends on where you live.