What is boiler room fraud exactly?

The sale of non existent or worthless investments through intensive telephone and digital contact, usually followed by pressure to pay again before a withdrawal is allowed.

Does Paucitas investigate older cases as well?

Yes. On-chain data remain available for years, and bank statements can be requested. Age lowers the chance of recovery, not the chance of establishing the facts.

Can a company also be a victim?

Yes, and it happens regularly. For companies we also set out the effect on the accounts, which an accountant will ask about.

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What is boiler room fraud and who investigates it in the Netherlands?

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

Paucitas records what happened to your money in a boiler room case and investigates the party that approached you by telephone. What is boiler room fraud, put plainly, is the sale of non existent or worthless investments through intensive telephone and digital contact, and Paucitas investigates it in the Netherlands for private individuals, companies and lawyers.

What Paucitas does

We first establish where your money went: which wallets or accounts received your payments and how the balance was distributed afterwards. In parallel we map the party itself, using the domain name, the trading names used and the numbers you were called from.

Those two lines are kept apart in the report. The flow of funds is a matter of record; the description of the approach is an account of what your own material shows.

An investigation establishes three things: where your money went, which names and channels the seller used, and whether the pattern of the approach can be documented. The question what is boiler room fraud is answered in the file by the pattern itself rather than by a label, because a label is for the authorities to apply.

What you supply

You supply your proofs of payment and the payment addresses, the prospectus or the documents you were given, and the numbers you were called from. The step most often underestimated is keeping exactly those telephone numbers and the times of the calls: together they show the pattern of the approach, even when the website is already offline.

Anything written down at the time is valuable: the dates and times of the calls, the numbers, the names given, and the documents you were sent. Those numbers and times are the part people throw away first and miss most.

Where a website or an app was involved, add the address and any screenshots you kept of the account overview. A page that is already offline can often still be retrieved from public archives, and the version you saw is what matters for the file rather than the version that is live now.

What you receive

You receive a report with the flow of funds, an overview of the names and channels used, and a description of the method as it appears from your data. For matters in the Netherlands the report is written so that it fits a Dutch police report and the questions a Dutch bank asks about an outgoing payment.

For an international reader, the Dutch setting is relevant in one specific way. The Dutch financial markets authority publishes warnings about unlicensed providers, and a file that matches a known warning tends to move faster with a bank. Where no warning exists, the documented pattern has to do the work on its own, which is precisely what the report is built for.

How to get started

You come to us with the name under which you were approached and the amounts you transferred. A first assessment costs nothing and tells you whether there is enough to work with. The contact page is the place to start, and a short message is enough.

Older cases are still worth a message. Bank statements can be requested and the chain stays readable, so age reduces the chance of recovery rather than the chance of establishing what happened.

Whether a provider is legally qualified as a boiler room is for the competent authorities to decide.

Further reading