Take a breath. What you do in the next hour matters more than anything you did before it, and some of it genuinely changes what you get back. This page is the order to do it in.
- Cut contact, secure your accounts, and screenshot everything before it disappears. Do not tell the scammer you know.
- How you paid decides what is recoverable: a card or a direct bank transfer has real routes back. Crypto sent from your own wallet usually does not, and honesty about that will save you from the second scam.
- Anyone who contacts you offering to recover the money is the second scam. No exceptions worth betting on.
The first hour
Stop talking to them, and do not announce it. The moment a scammer knows you have caught on, anything still reachable gets drained and every trace gets deleted. No confrontation, no final message, however much you want to send one. Just stop.
Screenshot everything now. The chat, the website, the wallet addresses you sent to, usernames, phone numbers, the transaction confirmations. Scam sites vanish within days and chat histories can be deleted from both ends. Every report you make later will ask for exactly this, and an hour from now some of it may not exist.
Secure the accounts they touched. If they had remote access to your device, or you typed a password anywhere they showed you, work through our account security guide in order: email first, then the exchange, then everything sharing that password. If they have your , the coins in that wallet are already theirs; move anything left to a fresh wallet with a fresh phrase, this minute, and never reuse the old one.
Then ring your bank on 159. That is the anti-fraud line every major UK bank answers. If money left your bank account today, minutes matter: banks can sometimes freeze or claw back a transfer that has not fully settled, and the receiving bank can freeze what is still sitting in the mule account.
How you paid decides everything
People talk about crypto scams as if the crypto part is what matters. For getting money back, it is the opposite: what matters is the last step your money took that a regulated company controlled.
You paid by debit or credit card. Real routes exist. Ask your card provider for a chargeback, and on a credit card purchase between £100 and £30,000 you may also have a Section 75 claim, which makes the card company jointly liable. Do not let the word crypto put you off asking. The worst answer is no.
You sent a bank transfer straight to the scammer. Since October 2024, UK banks must reimburse victims of authorised push payment fraud up to £85,000 in most cases, even though you authorised the payment yourself. It covers Faster Payments, which is what almost every ordinary transfer is. Report it to your bank, use the phrase “APP fraud”, and if they refuse, take it to the Financial Ombudsman for free.
You sent money to your own exchange account first, then sent crypto out. This is the route most crypto scams deliberately steer you down, and here is the honest part: the £85,000 rule generally does not cover it, because the bank transfer went to an account in your own name. The bank saw you funding your own account. Report it anyway, and tell the exchange too: they deal with this daily, can freeze what is still in your account, and sometimes flag the destination wallet in time to trap funds on their platform.
You sent crypto from your own wallet. A confirmed transaction cannot be reversed by anyone: not the police, not an exchange, not the people who make the wallet. What is realistic is tracing rather than reversing. Stolen coins usually flow toward an exchange eventually, because that is where crypto becomes money, and a police report with the transaction details is what lets funds be frozen if they land somewhere regulated. That does happen. It is slow, it is not the norm, and nobody honest will promise it.
The reason to be clear-eyed about recovery is not pessimism. It is that false hope is the raw material of the second scam, and the second scam is waiting for you specifically.
The second scam is aimed at you now
Within days of being scammed, sometimes within hours, you will start seeing people offering to get your money back. Replies to anything you post about it. Messages from “recovery agents”. Slick websites for “crypto recovery services” with testimonials and case numbers. Some will know details of what happened to you, because the person who scammed you sells the list of victims, or simply comes back wearing a different name.
The tell never changes: an upfront fee, or a request for your or remote access “to trace the funds”. Nobody legitimate charges in advance to recover stolen crypto, and nobody at all needs your seed phrase to investigate anything. The people who fall hardest for recovery fraud are people who were just scammed, which is exactly why it exists.
Who to tell, in order
Your bank, on 159, if any money moved through a bank account or card. First, because it is the only call where minutes change the outcome.
The exchange, through its official support page, never through anyone who contacts you. Use the word “fraud” in the first line.
Action Fraud for England, Wales and Northern Ireland; call Police Scotland on 101 if you are in Scotland. You get a crime reference number, which banks, exchanges and insurers will ask for. Be honest and complete, including the embarrassing parts. The report is read by people who have seen every variation of this and judge none of them.
The FCA, if the scam wore the costume of an investment firm or trading platform. Reporting it gets the firm onto the warning list, which is often what saves the next person.
Forward the bait. Scam texts go to 7726, free from any UK network. Scam emails go to report@phishing.gov.uk. Thirty seconds each, and it is how the infrastructure behind the scam gets taken down.
What happens next, honestly
A crime reference number is not an investigation promise, and most individual cases are not separately investigated. Reports get pooled, patterns get chased, and takedowns happen at the level of the operation rather than the victim. Card and APP-fraud claims, on the other hand, are personal and often succeed: they are decided on rules, not on whether anyone catches the scammer.
One more thing that feels small and is not: losses on crypto that was stolen from you can sometimes be claimed against tax as a negligible value claim, depending on the circumstances. It is covered in our UK crypto tax guide, and it is the one form where the embarrassing story has a cash value.
Common questions
Will the police get my crypto back?
Almost certainly not directly, and anyone promising otherwise is selling something. What the report does is feed the freezing of funds when they surface somewhere regulated, and build the case that shuts the operation. Both are real, and neither is quick.
Should I be embarrassed?
No, and this matters practically, not just kindly. These operations are run by organised teams who script every step and rehearse against people far more cynical than you. Embarrassment is why losses go unreported, why banks see fewer claims than they should, and why the same script keeps working. The report you file while feeling stupid is the one that protects someone else.
The scammer is still messaging me. Should I string them along?
No. Nothing useful comes from it, some victims have been talked back into “one more payment to release the funds”, and your screenshots already hold the evidence. Block, report, done.
It happened months ago. Is it too late to report?
No. The freeze-the-transfer window is gone, but chargebacks, APP-fraud claims and Section 75 all have time limits measured in months and years, not hours, and the report still counts. File it.