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How It Works

Watch Out for the Second Scam

Once you've been scammed once, you become a target for what comes next. The same group, or a new one that bought your information, will reach out claiming they can recover your money if you pay them an upfront fee, a tax, a deposit, or a  “processing charge”. They might say they're a law firm, a blockchain investigator, a government recovery agent, or a hacker who can “reverse” the transaction.

All of those are scams. Every single one.

  • Legitimate recovery only happens through law enforcement and the exchange's compliance team. It doesn't cost you money.
  • Crypto transactions cannot be “reversed”. Anyone promising that is lying.
  • Don't pay anyone, send any more crypto, share your screen, install any software, or hand over any ID to a stranger who contacted you about your loss.

If someone contacts you offering recovery, report them too. In Canada, Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. In the US, IC3.

What we do

Phended Trace reads publicblockchain data. When you paste a wallet address, we ask Bitcoin or Ethereum's public ledger for every outgoing transaction from that wallet, and then for every outgoing transaction from those wallets, and so on for a few hops.

Why “known exchange” matters

Cryptocurrency is hard to recover once it's moved. But the moment a scammer cashes out at a regulated exchange (Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, etc.), they had to identify themselves to that exchange. Police and the exchange's compliance team can act on that. Our job is to point at that handoff so your scam report has something actionable in it.

What we can't do

  • We do not recover funds. Nobody legitimate offers this service.
  • We can't see what happened inside a mixer like Tornado Cash — that's the whole point of a mixer.
  • We don't yet follow ERC20 token transfers (USDT, USDC, scam tokens) on Ethereum. ETH-only for now.
  • We don't cover every blockchain. BTC and ETH only at launch. Tron-USDT (where most pig-butchering money lands) is on the roadmap.

What to do next

Take the trace report and attach it to your filing: