Where to Report Crypto Fraud
6 min read
Filing an official report costs nothing and takes under an hour. It creates the record that exchanges, banks, and investigators rely on, and it is a prerequisite for most recovery pathways. File regardless of what else you decide to do.
United States — file these first
Submit to each of the following that applies. They serve different functions and do not share submissions automatically.
- IC3 (ic3.gov) — the FBI's internet crime centre; the primary US filing for crypto fraud
- FTC (reportfraud.ftc.gov) — feeds the Consumer Sentinel database used by law enforcement
- CFTC (cftc.gov/complaint) — for fraudulent trading platforms and commodity schemes
- SEC (sec.gov/tcr) — where the scheme involved securities or investment contracts
- Your state attorney general's consumer protection office
- Local police — for a report number your bank or insurer may require
International channels
File in your own country as well as any jurisdiction the operator claimed to be based in.
- United Kingdom — Action Fraud (actionfraud.police.uk) and the FCA scam reporting line
- Canada — Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre
- Australia — Scamwatch and ReportCyber
- European Union — your national police cybercrime unit and financial regulator
- The regulator whose licence number the platform claimed to hold
Exchanges and platforms
If the funds reached an exchange, report to that exchange's compliance or law-enforcement request team with the transaction hashes and destination addresses. Also report the originating platform to any service it used — domain registrar, hosting provider, app store, and the social or dating platform where contact began.
Your own bank or card issuer
Report immediately if fiat was involved. Card payments may fall within chargeback windows, and wires may be recallable within a short period. Speed matters more here than anywhere else in the process.
What reporting realistically achieves
Individual cases are rarely investigated in isolation. What reporting does is link your case to others in the same cluster, and clusters are what get investigated, indicted, and seized. Funds returned from law-enforcement seizures go to victims who filed reports. If you never filed, you are not on the distribution list.
Have this ready before you file
All transaction hashes and wallet addresses, dates and amounts, the platform's URL and any registration claims, the communication history, and a short chronological account of what happened.
Need this done properly?
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