Crypto Scam & Fraud Recovery Lawyer. Following the money is only the first step.
Crypto scam lawyer Agustin M. Barbara represents victims of cryptocurrency fraud and theft. The firm combines legal representation with in-house blockchain tracing to evaluate the evidence and identify potential recovery options.
Digital theft creates a chain of legal problems
Losing cryptocurrency to fraud is rarely a single event. There is the transfer itself, the records held by the exchange you sent it from, the accounts the money moved into, and (often months later) a government seizure or a bank inquiry that puts part of the story back in front of you.
Each of those creates a different question with a different answer, and they do not all have the same deadline. What follows is how the pieces usually fit together, so you can see which part of the problem you are actually in.
Common situations
Read more about situations the firm reviews:
The platform will not let you withdraw
Representative Experience
Selected federal matters handled by Agustin M. Barbara, including work before the launch of his independent practice.
United States v. Approximately 225,364,961 USDT
NO. 25-CV-01907 (D.D.C.)
Verified claims filed for more than one hundred scam victims in a federal forfeiture proceeding involving approximately $225 million in USDT and more than $70 million in combined client losses.
Bandyopadhyay v. Defendant 1, also known as Suxia Obei, also known as Sasha, and John Does 1-20
NO. 22-CV-22907 (S.D. Fla.)
The first federal cases to authorize service of process on anonymous foreign cryptocurrency defendants through NFT transfers to their blockchain wallets, ultimately resulting in a $957,281.50 judgment.
United States v. $811,549.41 in Bank Funds in Citibank Account ‘1187, et al.
NO. 23-CV-08774 (C.D. Cal.)
Represented a victim of a sophisticated investment-platform scheme that involved both wire transfers and cryptocurrency, in a matter that concluded with a consent judgment returning $1,260,874.44 in seized assets.
Prior results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any future matter. Each case depends on its own facts.
How the loss unfolds
The platform stopped letting you withdraw
This is the most common way people arrive here, and if it is where you are, the sequence is probably familiar.
The account showed a balance. Early withdrawals worked, or a small one did. Then a larger withdrawal was refused, and the reason given was a payment: a tax, a fee, a verification deposit, a percentage of the profits, something owed before the funds could be released. Customer service was responsive until it wasn’t.
Paying it does not release the funds. There is no tax authority, exchange or regulator that requires money to be sent to a platform before a withdrawal is processed. Legitimate tax on a gain is assessed after the fact, by a tax authority, against you, never as a precondition collected by the platform holding your balance. The same is true of “anti-money-laundering deposits,” “liquidity fees,” “account upgrade” payments and “insurance” against a frozen account.
If you have already paid one of those and been asked for another, that pattern is the answer to whether a further payment will work.
If you are still inside this and have not sent the requested payment: stop there, preserve everything, and get the records out before the account is closed to you. The exchange statements, the message history and the transaction hashes are what any later step is built on, and they are easiest to obtain while you still have access.
If money also left your bank
A large share of these matters have a second leg that has nothing to do with a blockchain. Funds are moved by wire or ACH from a bank account, sometimes to a domestic intermediary, sometimes directly overseas, before any cryptocurrency is purchased at all.
That leg has its own record set, its own institutions and its own timelines, and it is frequently the more productive one. Banks retain wire detail; receiving institutions can be identified; and unlike a self-custodied wallet, a bank sits inside a regulatory structure that responds to legal process.
If any part of what you lost left as a wire or a transfer, say so at the outset. It changes what is worth doing first.
What the evidence can establish
What a trace can establish, and what it cannot
Blockchain analysis reconstructs where value moved. Done properly it produces a transaction-by-transaction record from your own deposits forward, identifies the services holding funds downstream, and distinguishes an intermediate hop from a resting place.
What it does not do is name a person. Address attribution is an inference drawn from patterns and from records held elsewhere: an exchange’s know-your-customer file, a subpoena return, a government filing. A trace can tell you which institution to ask. It cannot, by itself, tell you who was on the other end.
That distinction matters because it determines what the work is actually for. Tracing is not the remedy. It is the evidence a remedy is built on, and its value is in identifying the parties who can be reached by legal process.
Where the money goes after it leaves you
Funds taken in these schemes rarely sit still. They are typically consolidated, moved across chains through bridges or swap services, and passed through intermediaries before reaching an exchange where they can be converted.
Understanding that path is not academic. It determines whether there is a regulated institution anywhere downstream, because where there is, there is somewhere for a demand, a subpoena or a preservation request to go. Where the path ends in self-custody with no service in between, the honest answer is different.
Other routes and deadlines
If the government has already seized funds
Sometimes the first news is a letter. A federal agency seizes cryptocurrency connected to a scheme, and victims whose funds are traceable into what was seized may be able to assert a claim.
That is a separate process with its own rules and its own deadlines, and the deadlines are short and unforgiving. If you have received a notice, or if you have seen a news report about a seizure connected to the platform you used, treat it as time-sensitive on its own terms.
Crypto seized by the government: what happens next Federal forfeiture, restitution and remission
Tax consequences of crypto theft
A theft loss is a tax question as well as a legal one, and the two are often handled by different people who never speak to each other.
The short version: a loss of this kind may be treated very differently from an investment loss, the treatment turns on facts including whether the transaction was entered into for profit, and the documentation that supports a claim is largely the same documentation a trace produces. Because the analysis is fact-specific and the rules have changed more than once, this belongs in front of a tax professional with the actual records, not resolved from a general article.
What is worth knowing now is that the records are the constraint. Keep them.
What representation looks like
How the work begins
The first conversation is a review of what happened and what records exist. It is free, it is confidential, and it does not create an attorney-client relationship.
If the matter is one the firm can help with, the work usually begins with the trace, because almost everything else depends on it: who can be reached, which institutions hold relevant records, whether funds are identifiable in a seizure, and whether the amounts support the cost of going further. Blockchain investigation is done in house rather than referred out, which means the analysis is directed by the questions the legal work actually needs answered.
From there the routes diverge: demands and pre-arbitration against a custodian, claims in a federal forfeiture, referral packages to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center and other agencies, or litigation where a defendant can be identified and reached.
Learn about attorney Agustin M. Barbara and Director of Blockchain Investigations Denis Banchero.
What we cannot tell you
Not every matter has a route, and the firm will say so early rather than late.
Nobody can promise a recovery, and any firm or service that does is telling you something they cannot know. Whether anything is recoverable depends on where the funds went, whether they touched a regulated institution, whether that institution holds identifying records, whether a government has already reached the assets, and how much time has passed. Those facts are established by the work, not before it.
If the answer is that there is no practical route, that is a real answer and it is worth having early. It is also the answer that stops people spending more money chasing the loss.
One thing to be careful about right now. Fraud victims are frequently targeted a second time by services promising to recover what was taken, usually for a fee paid up front. A law firm’s fees are invoiced and payable in dollars. No legitimate firm or investigator needs your seed phrase, your recovery phrase, your private keys, your passwords or your two-factor codes, and none of them will ask you to send cryptocurrency for any reason.
Types of matters we handle
- Pig-butchering and investment scams
- Phishing and social engineering
- SIM-swap attacks
- Account takeover and unauthorized transfers
- Romance and impersonation scams
- Wallet compromise and hacks
- Fraudulent trading platforms