If you have just realised you have been scammed, start here and do not stop to read the rest of this page first: if you are 60 or older, call the National Elder Fraud Hotline on 833-372-8311 (Monday–Friday, 10am–6pm Eastern). They assign you a case manager who stays with you and will help you file the reports below. You do not need to have your details in order before you call.
Everyone else: work through the first four steps below today. Speed genuinely matters, and this page explains exactly why.
⏱️ The First Few Hours
Do these in order. Steps 1 and 2 are the only ones with a realistic chance of stopping money from leaving.
1. Stop paying. Completely.
If anyone is asking for one more payment to “unlock” your funds, cover a “tax,” pay a “fee,” or make a “final deposit to release” your money — that is the scam continuing. There is no unlock. Every additional payment is simply more money gone.
2. Call your bank and ask for a recall
If any part of this involved a wire transfer or a bank payment, this is your single most time-sensitive action. The FBI’s guidance is explicit:
Contact your bank and other financial institutions to safeguard your accounts. If wire transfers were sent, request a recall and a hold harmless letter from your financial institutions.
FBI IC3, Elder Fraud
Ask for two things by name: a recall of the funds, and a hold harmless letter. The FBI notes that doing this quickly “may reduce or eliminate your financial losses.”
Why the rush? The FBI runs something called the Financial Fraud Kill Chain — a process that works with banks to freeze fraudulent transfers before they settle and get moved on. In 2025 it froze $679 million of $1.16 billion in attempted theft, a 58% success rate. But it only works if the report arrives while the money is still traceable. (IC3 2025 Annual Report, pp. 18–19.)
3. Report it to the exchange, in writing
Contact whichever platform you used and report the transaction as fraudulent. Be realistic about what this achieves: an exchange cannot reverse a completed transfer. What it can sometimes do is flag or freeze the receiving account internally — and it creates a dated record that helps later.
⚠️ Find the support contact by typing the exchange’s address into your browser yourself. Do not search for a support phone number — fake ones are one of the most common follow-up scams.
4. Save everything before you delete anything
The urge to delete the app and put it behind you is completely understandable. Please screenshot first. Investigators specifically ask for:
- Transaction IDs (hashes) and wallet addresses — the FBI calls transaction details “the most important information you can provide”
- Amounts, which cryptocurrency, and exact dates and times
- Every message, email and text — screenshot the conversation before deleting the app
- The names, phone numbers, email addresses and usernames the scammer used
- Every website or app they told you to install, including screenshots of any fake “account balance”
- How you first met them, and on which platform
(Source: FBI IC3 PSA, August 2023.)
📋 Where to Report It
File with more than one. They do different jobs, and none of them charges you anything.
| Where | What it’s for | How |
|---|---|---|
| FBI IC3 | The main federal intake point for online crime. File even if you are unsure it qualifies, and even if you lost nothing. | ic3.gov — online only, no phone |
| National Elder Fraud Hotline | For victims 60+. A case manager helps you file everything else, including the IC3 report. | 833-372-8311, Mon–Fri 10am–6pm ET |
| FTC | Feeds a law-enforcement database used to build cases and spot trends. | reportfraud.ftc.gov |
| SEC | If it was pitched as an investment — fake trading platforms, Ponzi schemes, “guaranteed returns.” | sec.gov/tcr |
| CFTC | Bitcoin and Ether are legally commodities, so much crypto fraud lands here too. | cftc.gov/complaint or 866-366-2382 |
| Your state securities regulator | Often far more responsive to an individual than a federal agency. Worth doing. | Find yours via NASAA |
| Adult Protective Services | If an older adult is being financially exploited, including by a caregiver or relative. | Eldercare Locator: 800-677-1116, Mon–Fri 9am–8pm ET |
| Local police | Banks and insurers frequently require a police report number. | Non-emergency line. Call 911 if anyone is in danger. |
Note: if the FTC’s reporting form is temporarily unavailable when you visit, file with IC3 instead — it is the more important of the two for crypto — and try the FTC again later.
Also protect what hasn’t been taken yet
- Change your passwords — and if you reused that password anywhere else, change it there too.
- If they had remote access to your computer, update your security software and run a full scan.
- If you gave out your Social Security number, go to identitytheft.gov.
- Consider a credit freeze: Equifax 800-685-1111 · Experian 888-397-3742 · TransUnion 888-909-8872.
🚩 The Second Scam: “We Can Recover Your Crypto”
Please read this section even if you skip everything else. Being scammed once makes you a target for being scammed again, and the follow-up is often worse than the original.
After fraudsters steal victims’ money, they also profit from the victims’ information—either by hanging onto it for a few months and coming back to run another scam or by selling it on the dark web.
CFTC, “Don’t be Re-Victimized by Recovery Frauds”
The CFTC adds that “the majority of fraud victims are victimized more than once,” and that prior victims are targeted more often than people who have never been scammed.
How it works: someone contacts you claiming they can trace and retrieve your stolen crypto. They charge an up-front fee. Then they either disappear, or produce a worthless “tracing report” and ask for more money. Many claim to be law enforcement, lawyers, or blockchain investigators.
Three rules that will protect you
- “Law enforcement does not charge victims a fee for investigating crimes.” That is the FBI’s own sentence, from its warning about crypto recovery schemes. Anyone official asking for payment is not official.
- The IC3 will never contact you directly. Verbatim: “The IC3 will never directly communicate with individuals via phone, email, social media, phone apps, or public forums” and “will not ask for payment to recover lost funds.” Between December 2023 and February 2025 the FBI logged over 100 reports of scammers impersonating the IC3 itself.
- Private companies cannot seize cryptocurrency. The FBI: “Private sector recovery companies cannot issue seizure orders to recover cryptocurrency.” No exceptions, however sophisticated the website looks.
One tactic worth knowing because it is so effective: scammers create fake personas who join online support groups for fraud victims, pose as fellow victims, and then recommend a “recovery expert” who supposedly helped them. If you join a support group after being scammed — and many people do — be sceptical of anyone who arrives with a recommendation. (FBI IC3 PSA, April 2025.)
Red flags, from the CFTC’s own list
- You are asked to pay before any service is performed
- There is no US physical address, or no phone number — and you are pushed onto Telegram or WhatsApp
- They already know a suspicious amount about the money you lost
- They use a web-based email address rather than an official domain
- You are told the fee cannot come out of the recovered money, and is a “tax,” “retainer,” or “donation”
- Cut-and-pasted logos, or grammatical errors in official-looking documents
How to check whether an official is real: genuine US government email addresses and websites end in .gov or .fed.us. Government agencies will never demand immediate payment and will never ask you to pay by wire, gift card, prepaid card, or cryptocurrency. If you are unsure, hang up and call the agency back on a number you find yourself on its official website.
But do not ignore genuine mail. When funds really are recovered, victims are usually notified by post. The CFTC’s advice: verify it independently through the agency’s or court’s own website — “It’s good to take precautions, but don’t ignore the letter. It could also be real.”
💬 An Honest Word About Getting It Back
You deserve a straight answer rather than false hope.
Cryptocurrency transfers are, in the FBI’s word, irrevocable — they cannot be reversed. The FTC puts it plainly: “Once you pay with cryptocurrency, you can only get your money back if the person you paid sends it back.” Once funds reach exchanges in other countries, the FBI notes it faces “significant challenges” following them.
So: if the money went out as crypto, the realistic chance of recovery is low. That is the truth, and anyone telling you otherwise while asking for a fee is telling you what you want to hear in order to take more.
Report it anyway. Three reasons it is still worth the hour it takes:
- If a bank transfer was involved and you move fast, the kill chain genuinely does freeze money — 58% of the time in 2025.
- Your report feeds investigations that stop the same operation reaching someone else. The FBI’s Operation Level Up has notified more than 8,000 people who were being defrauded at that moment, reducing losses by over $500 million.
- Where assets are seized, restitution does reach victims — but only those who filed.
It Is Not Your Fault
One last thing, because shame is the reason most of this goes unreported.
In 2025, Americans aged 60 and over filed 201,266 complaints with the FBI and reported losing more than $7.7 billion — more than any other age group, averaging $38,500 each. Over 12,000 of them lost more than $100,000. (IC3 2025 Annual Report.)
These are not careless people. They are targeted by organised operations that do this professionally, full-time, with scripts refined on thousands of others. Being deceived by a professional deceiver is not a character failing.
Tell someone you trust, and make the call. 833-372-8311.
All figures and quotations on this page are sourced to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center, the FTC, and the CFTC, and were verified in July 2026. If you find anything here out of date, please tell us and we will correct it.