You Got Scammed Out of Crypto: What to Actually Do in the First 72 Hours

If you’re reading this because it just happened to you, skip the framework and go to the checklist below. Everything else can wait a few hours; preserving evidence and cutting contact can’t.

If you’re reading this to understand the scale of what you’re dealing with: you’re not an outlier. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) reported that investment fraud — the category that covers most pig-butchering and fake-platform scams — cost Americans $8.6 billion in 2025, with $7.2 billion of that tied specifically to cryptocurrency, up 24% from the year before, according to the FBI’s 2025 IC3 Annual Report. Crypto-related complaints alone accounted for more than $11 billion in reported losses across 181,565 complaints. This isn’t a fringe risk you failed to see coming — it’s one of the fastest-growing categories of fraud in the country, built specifically to be hard to see coming.

What kind of scam this actually is

The mechanics vary, but almost all of them follow the same shape: someone builds trust with you first — over weeks or months, through a dating app, a “wrong number” text, a group chat, or a social media connection — and only introduces the investment opportunity once the relationship feels real. This is what the industry and the FBI both call “pig butchering,” a deliberately ugly name for a deliberately ugly process: you’re fattened up with small, real-looking gains on a fake platform before being encouraged to put in more, often far more than you intended, right before the platform locks your withdrawal or invents a fee you have to pay first.

It’s different from a rug pull or a collapsed exchange, even though the end state — money gone, no clear way to get it back — looks similar. A rug pull is a project failing or absconding; an exchange collapse is a custody failure. This is neither. This is a person or organized group deliberately targeting you, specifically, over time. That distinction matters for what you do next, because the response here is closer to reporting a crime than managing an investment loss.

The first 24 hours

Stop sending anything else, immediately. If you’re still in contact with the person or platform, the single highest-value thing you can do right now is stop. Any request for one more deposit, a “verification” payment, a tax or release fee before a withdrawal — these are not obstacles on the way to getting your money out. They’re the same scam continuing, and paying them almost never results in the promised release.

Cut contact, but don’t delete anything. Block the contact once you’ve screenshotted everything you might need — but don’t delete the conversation itself first. You need it intact.

Preserve every piece of evidence before it disappears. Fake investment platforms and scam accounts get taken down fast, sometimes within hours of being reported by someone else. Before that happens, collect:

• Screenshots of the entire conversation, from the first message
• Screenshots of the fake platform — balances, “trades,” any withdrawal error messages
• Every wallet address you sent funds to, and the transaction hashes for each transfer
• Any usernames, phone numbers, profile links, or platform URLs involved
• Bank or card statements showing the fiat side of any transfer (an exchange purchase, a wire, a card charge)

Contact your bank or card issuer if fiat money moved recently. If you funded any part of this through a bank transfer, wire, or card within the last few weeks, call your institution directly. A wire or card chargeback isn’t guaranteed and the window closes fast, but it’s a real path that doesn’t exist once the money has converted to crypto and moved on-chain — so check it before assuming it’s not worth trying.

Secure your other accounts. Someone who spent weeks or months building a relationship with you may have picked up personal details — your employer, your other platforms, your habits — that make you a target for a follow-up attempt. Change passwords on financial accounts and enable two-factor authentication where you haven’t already.

Where to actually report it

Report it even though the odds of full recovery are honestly poor — a report is what makes the small amount of recovery that does happen possible, and it’s often a prerequisite for insurance claims, chargebacks, or a theft-loss tax filing later.

File with IC3 at ic3.gov. This is the FBI’s central intake for internet-enabled fraud, and it’s the same body that publishes the loss data above. Include every wallet address and transaction hash you have — that data feeds broader efforts to trace and, sometimes, freeze funds at exchanges further down the chain, even when it doesn’t lead to your specific funds coming back.

File a police report with your local department, even if the officer taking it has limited crypto expertise. A report number is frequently required later — by a tax preparer, an insurer, or a bank handling a chargeback dispute — and it’s much easier to get one now than to reconstruct the timeline months later.

Report it to the FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov if you’re in the US. The FTC and IC3 serve overlapping but not identical purposes, and filing with both costs you twenty extra minutes, not a second investigation’s worth of effort.

Notify the exchange you used to buy or send the crypto. If you moved funds through a mainstream exchange before sending them to the scammer, that exchange has a fraud or compliance team, and if the destination address is one they can flag, there’s a narrow window where an off-ramp attempt elsewhere can sometimes be caught. This window is measured in hours to days, not weeks.

Be honest with yourself about timelines. Crypto’s entire design point is that transfers are final and don’t need a bank in the middle to clear — which is exactly what makes it attractive to scammers and exactly what makes recovery structurally harder than a stolen credit card number. The FBI’s own Recovery Asset Team, which works with banks to freeze fraudulent wire transfers before they clear, reported freezing about $561 million in 2024 against $16.6 billion in total reported losses that year, according to the FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report — and that mechanism is built around reversible bank transfers, not direct wallet-to-wallet crypto transfers, which are harder still to unwind once confirmed.

The second scam: fake recovery services

Within days of reporting a scam — sometimes within hours of posting about it publicly — a second wave shows up: “recovery specialists,” self-described asset-tracing firms, or people claiming affiliation with the FBI, IC3, or a made-up regulator, all offering to get your funds back for an upfront fee.

This is common and well documented enough that the FBI issued a specific public service announcement about it. Between February 2023 and February 2024 alone, victims who were approached by fictitious “crypto recovery law firms” reported an additional $9.9 million in losses on top of what the original scam already cost them, according to the FBI’s PSA on fictitious law firms targeting crypto scam victims. The pattern in that advisory: scammers claim you’re on a government-affiliated victim list, route you into a private group chat “for secrecy,” and ask for a fee to verify identity or unlock funds before anything is returned — after which they either go quiet or ask for another fee.

The rule that cuts through almost every version of this: no legitimate recovery process — through law enforcement, an exchange, or a licensed attorney — asks you to pay an upfront fee, in crypto or gift cards, to release money it’s already found. If you already lost money to a scam, treat any unsolicited recovery offer as the second half of the same attack, not a lifeline.

The tax question

If you sold or lost crypto through legitimate market activity, that’s usually a straightforward capital loss. Fraud is different: money or crypto was taken from you, which many tax systems treat as a distinct theft-loss category with a higher evidentiary bar than a normal sale — and, unhelpfully, one that’s easy to get wrong if you file it the way you’d file an ordinary loss. Can You Claim a Tax Loss on Crypto You Can’t Sell? covers how theft-loss claims differ from capital losses and worthlessness claims, and why a documented incident — the same police report and IC3 filing you generated above — is often central to making the claim stick. This is general information, not tax advice for your situation; talk to a professional who handles theft-loss claims specifically before you file.

After the first 72 hours

Once contact is cut, evidence is preserved, and the reports are filed, the acute phase is over — what’s left is a longer, slower process of accepting that recovery, if it comes, will likely be partial and won’t be fast. That’s a hard adjustment, and it’s a different problem from the one this article solves. If part of what was lost was borrowed money — a loan, a credit line, funds pulled from savings meant for something else — the debt payoff plan for money borrowed to invest covers separating that obligation from the loss itself, which is worth reading once the immediate reporting is done. And if a second scam already found you through a fake recovery offer, treating that as its own separate incident to report — not a personal failure on top of the first one — is worth remembering; the tactics that got you into the pig-butchering scam and the tactics that get people into the recovery scam are built by people who do this for a living, against people who, by definition, weren’t expecting it.

FAQ

Is there any realistic chance I get my money back? Some, but plan around the honest odds, not the hopeful ones. Crypto moves fast and irreversibly once it leaves your wallet — there’s no bank to call and reverse the transaction the way there sometimes is with a stolen card. Recovery generally depends on catching it before the funds move through their final off-ramp, which is why reporting within hours, not weeks, actually matters. Even law enforcement’s own numbers on this are humbling: the FBI’s Recovery Asset Team reported freezing roughly $561 million in 2024 against $16.6 billion in total reported losses that year, and that program works mainly through bank wire transfers, a mechanism that doesn’t map cleanly onto crypto moving directly between wallets. Report anyway — it costs you nothing but time, and it’s sometimes the only path to any recovery at all — but don’t delay other decisions (debt, taxes, rebuilding) waiting on money that may never come back.

Should I try to get the money back myself by contacting the scammer again? No. Re-engaging to negotiate, plead, or demand the money back gives a scammer more information about you and more opportunities to run a second extraction — a common pattern is asking for a further “release fee,” “tax payment,” or “verification deposit” before funds can supposedly be returned. If you already paid one of these, that’s not confirmation the first scam is reversible; it’s a second scam using the first one as leverage. Cut contact and report through official channels instead.

How do I know if a “recovery service” that contacted me is legitimate? Treat any recovery offer that finds you — rather than one you sought out — as suspicious by default. The FTC’s own guidance is blunt on this: no legitimate company calls you and offers to get your money back for a fee. A real law enforcement or legal process doesn’t operate through private group chats, and it doesn’t need you to send more crypto or gift cards to “unlock” funds it supposedly already located. If you want a second opinion, verify a firm’s actual bar registration or license independently — not through a link the firm sent you — before paying anyone anything.

Can I claim this as a tax loss? Possibly, but it’s a different and often harder claim than a normal capital loss, because there was no sale — money or crypto was taken from you through fraud rather than a position simply losing value. Many tax systems have a distinct, higher-bar category for theft losses, and a documented police or IC3 report is often part of what substantiates it. This isn’t tax advice for your specific situation; see the theft-loss section of Can You Claim a Tax Loss on Crypto You Can’t Sell? for how that category works and what it typically requires, and talk to a professional before filing.