Back to Questions

I have been scammed with crypto, where can I turn?

By S.E. (Simcha) Schrijver, blockchain investigator at Paucitas

Paucitas establishes what happened to your money when you have been scammed with crypto, and records the route of your payment in a report you can use for a police report, for your bank and for your lawyer. You supply your transaction data and the contact you had with the provider, we follow the payments on the blockchain and record the findings so that they can be checked.

What Paucitas does

We start at your own payment and follow it onward, step by step. Every transfer is checked on the blockchain and linked to a time, an amount and, where the data allow it, to the service at which the funds arrived. Alongside that we record how the contact ran: the website or app, the people you spoke to and the moments at which you transferred money.

Those two strands come together in a single timeline. Your case is then no longer a set of loose screenshots and bank lines, but one account that an officer, a bank employee or a lawyer can read in the right order.

Being scammed with crypto is not one event but a sequence, and the sequence is what an investigation has to make legible. A single transfer says little. The same transfer placed next to the moment you were persuaded, the address it went to and the service where it surfaced says a great deal.

What you supply

You supply the transaction statements from the exchange or the wallet you paid from, the receiving addresses if you have them, and the bank statements of your deposits. The messages and screenshots from your contact with the provider are just as useful, because they show when you were persuaded to pay and on what grounds.

What you receive

You receive a report with five fixed parts: a summary of the findings, the timeline of your payments, a table giving per transaction the hash, the time, the amount and the destination, an account of the sources used, and the annexes holding your own documents. Anyone reading it can see which conclusion rests on which piece of data.

Because the case is based in the Netherlands in most matters we handle, the report is written so that the Dutch police, a Dutch bank and a Dutch lawyer can all work from the same document.

For readers outside the Netherlands it is worth knowing where a report like this lands. A Dutch police report is registered and given a number, but the police do not usually carry out on-chain analysis for individual cases. Banks, lawyers and civil courts do act on documented findings, which is why the report is written to be read by all three without adaptation.

How to get started

You contact us and describe in a few lines what happened and which amounts are involved. In a first conversation we set the scope together, and after that you know what is needed and what it costs before the work starts. You can reach us through the contact page, and a short message with the bare facts is enough to begin.

If you were scammed with crypto very recently, contact us the same week. Exchange accounts get closed, platforms go offline and support tickets disappear, and those are exactly the records that later turn out to matter. Nothing needs to be complete before you write.

What institutions do with the outcome, they decide themselves.

Warning: Scammers are posing as Paucitas! Click here for more information

We are available 24/7 at: