First: nobody legitimate will charge you to get your money back
Victims of crypto scams are targeted a second time. In August 2025 the FBI warned about fictitious law firms targeting cryptocurrency scam victims with offers to recover their funds. The warning signs it lists include:
- contact you did not ask for, often already knowing what you lost and when;
- payment requested in cryptocurrency or gift cards;
- claims that you are on a government “victim list”, or partnerships with agencies that do not exist;
- being added to a WhatsApp or Telegram group, or asked to open an account at a “foreign bank”;
- refusing a video call or to show proof of a licence to practise.
Reporting to the police or a regulator is free. If someone wants a fee before they will help, treat that as the warning sign it is.
Save the evidence while it still exists
Promoters delete posts, Telegram groups vanish and websites go offline within days. What is on the blockchain stays there, but you need to know where to point people. Before anything else, write down:
Your wallet address, and the transaction signatures of every buy and sell you made. A block explorer such as Solscan lists them for your wallet.
The token’s mint (contract) address, its name and ticker, the dates and times (in UTC if you can), and roughly what you paid and lost in SOL and in your own currency.
Screenshots of the posts, group messages, websites and usernames that promoted it, with the date. These are the parts that disappear first.
Keep the originals somewhere safe and send copies, not your only set. Never share your seed phrase or private key with anyone, including anyone who says they are investigating.
What reporting actually does
A report on its own rarely brings money back, and it is fair to say so. It still matters, for three reasons:
- Reports are combined. One loss looks small; hundreds linked to the same wallets become a case. The FBI received 181,565 complaints involving cryptocurrency in 2025 alone (IC3 2025 report).
- Exchanges respond to police, not to individuals. If the proceeds reach a centralised exchange, a police request is how funds get frozen.
- Regulators keep warning lists. Reporting a promoter or platform helps keep the next person away from it.
Where to report it, country by country
Use the country you live in. Where there are two columns, the first is the crime report (police or national cybercrime service) and the second is the financial regulator or consumer body.
Your country is not listed? econsumer.gov takes cross-border fraud reports on behalf of consumer protection agencies in many countries. Otherwise, your national police and your financial regulator are the right starting points.
About lawsuits
Class actions over memecoin launches have been filed in the United States. If you look into one, a few facts help: a genuine lawyer can be checked against the bar association or law society where they practise, will not ask to be paid in cryptocurrency or gift cards, and will not need your seed phrase. Start the contact yourself rather than answering someone who found you.
What Cabal-Hunter can and cannot do
- It can, on the website or in our Telegram bot, show who holds a token and who sold it, the wallet clusters we found with the transactions behind each one, and, where we recorded the launch as it happened, who bought in the first seconds. That can help you describe what happened when you report it.
- It cannot recover funds, freeze anything or tell you who is behind a wallet.
- We will never contact you offering to recover money. Anyone who does, using our name, is not us.
Know someone this happened to? This guide is also on X to share, and our Telegram bot sends it to anyone who types /rugged.