The first day decides most of it. What to do in the hours after a scam.
The first day decides most of it.
We talk to fraud victims every week. The honest numbers are below, because the dishonest ones are what the second wave of scammers is selling.
I wired money to a scammer. What do I do in the next hour?
Call your bank's fraud line and ask for a recall of the wire. Then file at ic3.gov with the account numbers, amounts and times; that filing is what triggers the FBI's Recovery Asset Team. In 2025 the team froze $679 million of $1.16 billion in reported transfers, a 58 percent rate, but only for fraud reported fast enough to reach it. Against the $20.9 billion in total losses the FBI logged that year, frozen funds came to about 3 percent, and a freeze is not a refund. Card payments run on their own clocks: dispute a billing error within 60 days of the statement under the Fair Credit Billing Act (15 U.S.C. §1666), and report an unauthorized debit within two business days to cap your liability at $50. The hardest payment to reverse is the one you authorized, no matter how they tricked you into it.
Who else should hear about it?
The Washington Department of Financial Institutions, if the scheme involved an investment, a lender, a money transmitter or a crypto platform; DFI licenses all of them and keeps an enforcement record. The Attorney General's consumer protection division, which cannot represent you but does notice patterns. The FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov. The SEC if securities were involved, the CFTC for commodities and crypto derivatives. None of these agencies will get your money back for you. All of them build the file that a civil case or a restitution order will rest on, so file anyway.
Can cryptocurrency be traced?
Yes. The ledger is public, and following a stolen sum from your wallet to a deposit address at an exchange is routine work; we do it often. Getting the exchange to freeze or identify the account is the hard part. American exchanges act on a subpoena, a court order or a law-enforcement request, which means a filed case, sometimes against a John Doe, and a lawyer. In Washington an exchange or crypto-kiosk operator has to hold a money-transmitter license from DFI under the Uniform Money Services Act; a bill to cap kiosk transactions died in committee in 2026. Tracing tells you where the money is. Recovery depends on whether it is still there and whether the exchange answers to an American court.
A company says it can recover my money for a fee. Should I pay?
No. The FBI's 2025 report says crypto-fraud victims get targeted a second time by "recovery" services, and we see it constantly. The tells never change: a guarantee, an upfront fee, a claimed partnership with law enforcement, a request for your seed phrase. A legitimate investigator will tell you the odds, quote the tracing and documentation, and put the result in a form your lawyer and the FBI can use. We do not promise recovery. Nobody honest does.
Lost money to someone you can no longer reach?
We talk to fraud victims every week. Tell us what happened, what you sent and where it went. We will tell you within a day whether the trail is worth following, what it would cost, and which reports to file first. We charge for investigation, never a percentage of what comes back, and we will say so plainly if the money is gone.
Contact Integra Intelligence