Crypto asset recovery. What can be traced, what can be frozen, and what cannot.
The ledger is public. The name is not.
Every transfer on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron and Solana is written to a ledger anyone can read, and it stays there. That is the good news, and it is all of the good news. The ledger records addresses, not people. Recovery is the work of following the money to the point where an address meets a name, which is almost always an exchange, and getting there before the money leaves.
Can stolen or scammed cryptocurrency be traced?
On the public chains, yes, and better than most victims expect. Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, Solana and the stablecoins that ride on them record every transfer, and a block explorer will follow your funds from the address you paid to the next one, and the next, until they land somewhere that is not a private wallet. That landing point is the objective. Scammers move money through chains of fresh addresses, split it, hop it across chains through a bridge, or push it through a mixer, and each of those slows a trace without ending it; clustering heuristics and exchange attribution labels reconnect most of what the splitting was meant to hide. What ends a trace is a privacy coin like Monero, or an exchange with no legal presence anywhere a subpoena reaches. We produce the trace as a flow-of-funds chart with every transaction hash, from your wallet to the exchange deposit addresses, in a form your lawyer can attach to a request. Free tools to trace crypto are available in the records toolkit.
What does an exchange subpoena actually return?
More than people think, which is why the exchange is the target. A regulated exchange has to know its customers, so behind the deposit address your money reached there is a file: the account holder's name, date of birth and address; the identity document and the selfie taken to open the account; the IP addresses and devices used to log in; the linked bank account and card; the full deposit and withdrawal history; and often other accounts opened from the same device or document. Exchanges with a United States presence, Coinbase, Kraken and Gemini among them, answer subpoenas and court orders through legal-process portals; the large offshore exchanges mostly answer law enforcement and ignore private parties. The stablecoin issuers are a separate lever: Tether and Circle can freeze tokens at the contract level on a law-enforcement request, wherever the wallet sits. Which instrument to send, and whether a civil subpoena or a police referral gets there first, is a question for your lawyer. What we supply is the address list, the exchange identification and the timeline, so the request names the right account on the first try.
Can the funds be frozen?
Sometimes, and the window is short. An exchange freezes an account for three reasons: its own compliance system flags the deposit, a law-enforcement agency asks, or a court orders it. The first happens on its own or not at all. The second is why the first hours after a scam matter: a report to the FBI's IC3 with the addresses and hashes attached is what an agent needs to send the request, and a report filed weeks later finds the account empty. The third is your lawyer's tool, and courts have granted freezing orders against exchanges and against unknown wallet holders in several jurisdictions. None of this works once the money leaves for a private wallet or an exchange that answers to no one. We tell you which of those you are looking at before anyone spends money on process.
The "platform" still shows my balance. Is the money there?
No. The trading platform in a romance or investment scam is a website with a database, and the balance is a number someone typed. Your money left the moment you sent it, usually to a wallet the scammer controlled, then to an exchange abroad. The site exists to get the next deposit, and the "tax" or "unlock fee" it demands before you can withdraw is the next deposit. The same is true of the recovery firms that find you afterward, promising to hack the scammer or "reverse the blockchain" for a fee up front; the Washington Department of Financial Institutions and the FBI both warn that these are the second scam. Nothing on the chain can be reversed. What can happen is a freeze, a seizure and, after a prosecution, a remission to victims, and each of those starts with a report, not a payment.
What does an investigator add that Etherscan does not?
Attribution. An explorer shows you hops; it does not tell you that the fifth hop is a Binance hot wallet, that the address you paid has been reported forty times on Chainabuse, or that the same wallet funded three other victims' scams in the same week, which turns one complaint into a pattern an agency will act on. We use commercial analytics platforms alongside the free ones, read across chains when the money bridges, and know which exchanges answer which kind of request. The product is a written report with the chart, the hashes, the exchange identifications and the timeline, signed by a licensed investigator, usable by your lawyer in a civil case and by a detective in a criminal one. When the trace ends at a mixer or an exchange beyond reach, the report says so, and we tell you to stop spending.
Is it worth pursuing?
It depends on three things, and we can usually answer all three from the hashes in a day. Where the money is now: at an exchange that answers process, or already gone through one that does not. How long ago it moved: hours and days are workable, months rarely are. And how much: process costs money, and a trace that ends at a reachable exchange is worth running for a loss in the tens of thousands and above, while a smaller loss is better served by a complete IC3 report and patience, since agencies aggregate victims and seize wallets in bulk. We do not take a trace we expect to fail, and we say so in the first conversation.
This page is general information, not legal advice. Whether to subpoena, sue or report, and in what order, is a decision for your lawyer. Last verified October 2026.
Still holding the transaction hash?
Send us the addresses, the transaction hashes and the dates. Within one business day we will tell you where the funds sit now, whether an exchange is in the chain, and whether a freeze is still realistic. Fixed fee for the trace; nothing for the first look.
Contact Integra Intelligence