Start from the honest part: a confirmed blockchain transaction cannot be undone, by us or by anyone. Anybody who tells you they can reverse it, or "re-mine" it, or recover it with a special tool, is running a second scam on you. What can be done is trace where the funds went and pursue whoever is holding them.
Why tracing works at all
Public blockchains record every transfer permanently and openly. Your coins can be followed from your wallet, hop by hop, indefinitely. What tracing is looking for is the moment funds arrive at a service with compliance obligations — an exchange, a payment processor, a custodian. That service knows who its customer is, and it can freeze a balance and respond to law enforcement. It is the pressure point in the whole chain.
What the trace produces
- The path from your transaction to the addresses that received it.
- Clustering that indicates which addresses are controlled together.
- Identification of known deposit addresses belonging to named services.
- Flags where funds entered a mixer, a cross-chain bridge or a high-risk service.
- A report in the form exchanges and law enforcement expect to receive.
Freezing
When funds land at a cooperative exchange, that exchange can freeze the balance while it investigates. Two things govern whether this succeeds:
- Timing. Funds often do not sit still. A freeze request that arrives hours after the deposit has a real chance; one that arrives weeks later usually finds an empty account.
- A law enforcement report. Most exchanges will not release funds to you on a private request alone, however well evidenced. They generally need a police report, and often a formal legal request, before money moves back. This is one of the main reasons we push you to report officially on day one.
Where tracing hits a wall
- Mixers and privacy tooling deliberately break the chain. Analysis can sometimes see through it partially, but often not conclusively.
- Non-cooperative exchanges. Some services simply do not respond, and if they sit outside any effective regulatory reach there is little leverage.
- Funds that never cash out. If it sits in a self-custodied wallet, we can watch it indefinitely but there is nobody to serve a request on. Long-dormant addresses do sometimes move years later, which is why a traced case is worth leaving on watch rather than closing.
- Conversion to cash offline. Peer-to-peer and cash-out networks can end the trail.
What you need to give us
The transaction hash for each transfer, the receiving address, and the network. With the hash, everything above becomes possible. Without it, we are working from a description, and often cannot even confirm the payment happened.