The second scam that finds you after the first

Losing crypto puts you on a list.

Say so anywhere public — a forum, a comment, a support ticket — and you've been marked as someone with money to lose, who's already lost some, and who wants it back. People work from that list.

What arrives is a message offering help. A “recovery specialist” who saw your post. A law firm with a real-looking website. Someone from the exchange, or a government body, saying funds have been frozen and can be returned.

The tone is calm and competent. The tone is the product.

The ask is always one of three things: a fee up front, a “verification” deposit, or your recovery phrase so they can “move the funds somewhere safe”. All three end the same way.

One rule covers every version of it.

A confirmed transaction on a blockchain can't be reversed by anyone.

Not the exchange. Not the developers. Not a specialist. Not a court order to a company that never held your coins. That isn't a customer-service limitation — it's the property the whole system is built on, and it has no exception for you.

So anyone promising recovery is promising something that can't be done. How they'd do it doesn't matter. There is no how.

One thing we'll never do, so you can measure us against it: we'll never message you about an address you looked up here. We don't store them, so we couldn't reach you about one if we wanted to.