Have it checked before you send the money

Why this service exists

A large share of the cryptocurrency work that comes through this office is not estate planning. It is people who have already been defrauded, arriving after the money has gone, asking what can be done. Usually the honest answer is: very little.

Almost every one of those clients had a moment, days or weeks earlier, when a second opinion would have cost them a few hundred dollars and saved them everything. This service is that moment, made available on purpose.

What we review

• The company or platform — whether it legally exists, where it is incorporated, who controls it, and whether the corporate record matches what you have been told.
• Registration and regulatory standing — whether it is registered to deal with Canadian residents, and whether any Canadian securities regulator has flagged, warned about or sanctioned it.
• The people involved — whether the individuals contacting you are who they claim to be, and whether their credentials, employment history and identity documents withstand checking.
• The offer itself — whether the returns described are consistent with anything that exists in the real market, and how the mechanics are supposed to work.
• The documents — contracts, prospectuses, whitepapers and account statements, read by a lawyer rather than skimmed.
• The money path — where your funds are actually going, and who controls the destination.

You receive a written assessment setting out what we found, what we could not verify, and what we would do in your position.

What it costs

The initial phone consultation is free. Call, describe what you have been offered or what has happened, and we will tell you straight away whether it shows the signatures of a fraud. That call costs you nothing whether or not you go any further.

Many enquiries end there, because the answer is obvious within a few minutes and you simply need someone qualified to say so out loud. If a full written review is warranted — corporate searches, regulatory checks, document analysis — we will tell you what that costs before starting, and you decide.

Warning signs worth knowing now

None of these is proof of fraud on its own. Two or more together should stop you.

1. Urgency. A closing window, a limited allocation, a price about to move. Legitimate investments are still there next week. Urgency exists to prevent you from checking.
2. Guaranteed or unusually consistent returns. No real market delivers a fixed monthly percentage. A dashboard showing steady gains is a web page, not a portfolio.
3. You were approached. Through social media, a messaging app, a dating profile, a wrong-number text that became a friendship, or an online group. Almost no legitimate opportunity arrives that way.
4. Withdrawals are blocked or taxed. You are told a fee, tax or deposit is required before you can withdraw. This is the defining moment of the fraud — the money is already gone, and the fee is an attempt to take more.
5. You are coached on what to tell your bank. Or told to keep it private, or warned that family will not understand. Isolation is deliberate.
6. The platform exists only where they sent you. An app installed from a link, a site you cannot find independently, an exchange with no history you can verify.
7. Celebrity or institutional endorsement. Almost always fabricated, and trivially cheap to fake convincingly.

What we can and cannot do

We will tell you what the available evidence shows, and we will be blunt about it. What we cannot do is prove a negative — an assessment that finds nothing alarming is not a guarantee that an investment is sound, and it is never a recommendation to invest. We give no investment advice and express no view on whether any cryptocurrency is a suitable investment for you.

We also cannot recover cryptocurrency that has already been transferred. Where a loss has occurred we can advise on reporting to the police and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, on notifying your bank where fiat transfers are involved, and on whether any realistic civil claim exists against a counterparty within reach of a Canadian court. Sometimes there is one. Often there is not, and we will say so rather than bill you to find out slowly.

If you have already lost money

Do these things now, before anything else:

1. Stop sending. Do not pay a fee, tax or deposit to release funds. That is the fraud continuing.
2. Preserve everything. Screenshots, messages, transaction IDs, wallet addresses, emails, names, phone numbers, the app itself. Do not delete the conversation out of embarrassment — it is the evidence.
3. Report it. Your local police, and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre.
4. Tell your bank immediately if any part of the transfer went through a Canadian financial institution. Speed matters here in a way it does not on-chain.
5. Assume you will be targeted again. See the recovery-services warning above.

Being defrauded is not a failure of intelligence. These operations are professionally run, well resourced, and specifically designed to work on careful people. The clients who lost the most were rarely the least careful.

Related

• Buying safely, with the exchange vetted first
• Securing what you already hold