Who investigates scams involving crypto investments?

By R.T. (Tyler) Dijst, blockchain investigator at Paucitas

Paucitas is an independent expert firm in the Netherlands that investigates investment fraud and crypto fraud and establishes legitimate crypto assets.

What Paucitas does

We investigate two things alongside each other: the flow of funds and the set up. The flow of funds is a matter of on-chain record. The set up is established from the domain name, the wallets the platform used, the public registers and the material you were shown.

Keeping them separate matters. A platform can be badly run without being a scam, and only the combination of the two lines shows which of the two you are looking at.

We investigate two things alongside each other: the flow of funds and the set up. The flow of funds is a matter of on-chain record. The set up is established from the domain name, the wallets the platform used, the public registers and the material you were shown. Keeping them separate matters, because a platform can be badly run without being a scam.

What you supply

You supply your proofs of deposit, the addresses you transferred to, screenshots of the account you saw at the platform, and the messages or calls with your account manager. The screenshots are more important than people expect, because they record the figures the platform showed you.

Screenshots of the account you saw are more important than people expect. They record the figures the platform showed you, and the gap between those figures and the chain is often the clearest finding in the whole file.

Deposit receipts from your bank complete the chain. They show that the euros left an account in your name, which is the link that makes the on-chain part of the file yours rather than merely interesting.

What you receive

You receive a report with the flow of funds, a description of the set up and an account of the method. In one anonymised case someone made four deposits through an exchange to an address belonging to an investment platform, and the wallet concerned turned out to have received deposits from dozens of addresses while never sending a payment out.

That single observation carried more weight with the bank than the whole correspondence had, because it could be checked by anyone.

For an international reader the Dutch angle is straightforward. The Dutch financial markets authority licenses and warns, the police register, and the civil courts decide on claims. None of them produce on-chain analysis for an individual case, which is the gap the report fills.

The report also records what could not be established. Where a wallet was emptied to a service that publishes nothing, that is written as a stop rather than left open, so a reader does not mistake silence for a pending lead.

How to get started

You come to us with the name of the platform, the amounts and the dates of your deposits. We say honestly whether there is enough on the chain to work with. Write through the contact page, and if several people invested with the same platform, mention that too.

If several people invested with the same platform, say so. Reading the addresses together usually sharpens each file, and it costs less per person than four separate investigations.

What an institution or a court does with the outcome remains for that institution itself.