“We Can Get Your Stolen Crypto Back”: The Recovery Scam

Losing crypto to a scam is painful, and in that vulnerable moment a new offer often appears: someone claims they can trace and recover your stolen funds. For most victims, this is not a lifeline. It is a second scam, engineered to profit from the very people already hurt once. Recognizing it protects you from losing even more.

What the scam is

A recovery scam targets people who have recently lost crypto. The scammer poses as a recovery specialist, a blockchain investigator, a lawyer, or even an official body, and promises to get your money back, usually for an up-front fee or by regaining access to your wallet. In reality they cannot recover anything. They simply extract more money, more fees, or your remaining credentials.

How it works, step by step

1. Finding the victim

Recovery scammers seek out people who have posted about a loss, complained in a group, or appeared on lists of prior victims. Sometimes the same network that ran the first scam circles back for a second attempt. You may be contacted out of the blue with reassuring, confident messaging.

2. The credible pitch

They present professional-looking materials, claim special tools or connections, and may show fake evidence that your funds have been “located” or “frozen” and are ready to release.

3. The up-front cost

Before recovering anything, they require payment: a fee, a retainer, a tax, or a deposit. Alternatively, they ask for access to your wallet or your seed phrase so they can “return” the funds, which would let them steal whatever remains.

4. The repeat

After you pay or grant access, the recovery never materializes. More fees appear, or they vanish. You end up worse off than before.

The exact red flags

• An unsolicited offer to recover lost crypto, especially soon after a loss.
• Any up-front fee, deposit, or tax required before funds are supposedly returned.
• A request for your seed phrase or wallet access in order to “recover” funds.
• Guarantees of recovery and claims of special access, since genuine tracing is uncertain and never guaranteed.
• Pressure and confidence combined with professional-looking but unverifiable credentials.

How to avoid it

Start from a hard truth: recovering stolen crypto is genuinely difficult, and no honest party can guarantee it. So treat any confident promise of recovery, particularly one that arrives uninvited, as a scam by default. Never pay an up-front fee to someone who contacted you claiming they can retrieve your funds, and never hand over your seed phrase or wallet access to anyone, for any reason, including recovery.

If you want to pursue legitimate avenues, initiate them yourself through official channels rather than responding to inbound offers. Report the original theft to your local police and your national cybercrime or fraud reporting service, and if you used an exchange, notify its official support. Some reputable on-chain security and analytics firms do real tracing work, but you approach them directly and verify them independently, rather than trusting anyone who approaches you first.

It helps to understand why victims are so often targeted twice. The emotional aftermath of a theft, the mix of grief, anger, and desperate hope, is exactly the state recovery scammers look for, because it makes a confident promise of getting the money back extraordinarily tempting. They know you want to believe recovery is possible, and they weaponize that wish. Protecting yourself means accepting a hard reality up front: the odds of recovering stolen crypto are low, and anyone who erases that uncertainty with a guarantee is telling you what you want to hear in order to take more. Sitting with the discomfort of an unresolved loss is painful, but it is far safer than paying a stranger to soothe it.

What to do if a recovery scammer has reached you

• Do not pay anything and do not share your seed phrase or wallet access.
• Cut off contact and block the account or number.
• Verify independently. If a service or official body is named, look it up yourself through official channels and confirm before engaging.
• Preserve evidence of both the original scam and the recovery approach, which helps investigators see connected fraud.
• Report the recovery attempt to your local police and national fraud reporting service, noting that you were targeted a second time.

A promise from us: TokenSpin will never contact you offering to recover lost funds, and we will never ask for a fee, your seed phrase, or wallet access. Any recovery offer using our name is fraudulent.