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 who contacts you offering recovery for a fee is offering something they cannot do. There is no private service that reverses a transaction, and no specialist who can move coins without the keys.

Two narrow exceptions exist. If the coins landed in an account at a regulated exchange, that exchange can freeze the account — the transaction still stands, but a company is holding the balance and can be made to stop. And law enforcement can seize funds. Both are rare, both are slow, and neither is something you pay a stranger to arrange. You start with the exchange and the police, and nobody charges you up front.

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.