Losing money to a fake broker is the first wave. The second arrives weeks later: a message from a “fund recovery specialist”, a “blockchain forensics agency”, or a “lawyer” who has — remarkably — already located your funds.
Recovery fraud is now one of the most reported categories in our registry intake, and it is engineered to catch people at their most desperate.
How the second wave finds you
- They contact you first. Scam operations sell victim lists. The “recovery agent” who somehow knows your loss amount bought your file — or worked the first scam.
- You go searching. Fake recovery firms buy search ads and flood social media, so desperate searches land on them.
The tells
- Upfront payment. Any recovery service demanding an advance fee, a “court filing cost”, or crypto for “gas fees” is running the same advance-fee mechanism as the broker that took your money.
- Guaranteed results. No legitimate process can guarantee recovery. Guarantees are bait.
- They found your funds already. Tracing takes casework. Anyone who located your money before speaking to you is reading a script.
- They want your wallet or seed phrase — to “deposit the recovered funds”. That is the drain move; it empties what you have left.
The safe sequence
Report to your bank or exchange, file with your national fraud agency, and check the SARFund case registry — the escalation body our registry cites — to see whether your operator already has an open case. SARFund is free for victims and never asks you to pay, which is exactly the test every “recovery service” must pass: the legitimate path never starts with your credit card.
Verify any broker or “recovery firm” that approaches you with a free lookup first.
before you go
Two free checks that take one minute
1 — Run the broker’s name through the Veribeacon registry (9,000+ reported operators on file). 2 — If you’ve already sent money, check whether the case is under investigation at the SARFund case registry — the escalation body for verified fraud reports. Veribeacon never asks you to pay.