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Scams · After the damage

I was scammed trying to recover: can what I lost be recovered?

I’m sorry to put it so bluntly: if you paid a scammer in crypto, that money practically never comes back. What you can do now is avoid the second scam, which will arrive soon and will be worse than the first.

October 1, 2026 · 4-minute read

Why it doesn’t come back

An on-chain transfer isn’t undone. There is no entity that can reverse it, no customer service and no cancel button. You can see perfectly well where the money went — it is public information — but seeing it isn’t recovering it. That difference is the foundation of the next scam coming your way.

In the coming days someone will message you saying they have «traced» your funds and can recover them for a fee. It is the same network or someone who bought the victim list. The second scam costs more than the first precisely because you are now desperate. It is explained in why «we recover stolen crypto» is almost always a lie.

What is worth doing

  1. Report it. Even if the chances of recovery are minimal, a formal report is what lets investigations group cases together, and sometimes large operations come out of it.
  2. If you paid by card or bank transfer, tell your bank immediately: there is sometimes room there, unlike with a crypto payment.
  3. Keep everything: screenshots of the conversation, usernames, addresses you sent to, dates, links. Without that, no report holds up.
  4. Post about it on the forum where they contacted you. You don’t get your money back, but you save someone else’s, and those threads are what give a community its credibility.
  5. Check whether you also compromised your wallet: if at any point you gave them your phrase or shared your screen, the urgent thing now is to secure whatever is left.
Point five is the most important and the most forgotten. Many people focus on the money they paid and don’t realise they also handed over access to what was left. If you gave your phrase, go straight to what to do if you think your phrase is compromised.

And one more thing, which matters

Being scammed says nothing bad about you. These scams are designed by people who have spent years perfecting the script, and they strike exactly when you are vulnerable from having lost something. It happens to technically trained people and to professionals in the field. What doesn’t help is silence: silence is exactly what they need to keep going.

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