Recovery scam

A follow up contact, typically weeks or months after an initial loss, from a party presenting itself as a recovery agency, a law firm, a blockchain investigator or an official body. The proposition is that funds can be traced and returned, and the condition is a payment made in advance for fees, taxes or a deposit against the sum to be recovered. The pattern is stable across jurisdictions because it works on a list that already exists.

The list is the mechanism. Details of people who lost money to a first operation circulate, so the second approach arrives already knowing the amount lost, the firm involved and often the dates, which is precisely the knowledge that makes it credible. A caller who can quote the details of a private loss is usually reading them from the record of that loss rather than from an investigation.

The check that settles it is documentary rather than a judgement about tone. No official body charges a fee to return money it is holding. A genuine complaint route runs through the firm's own procedure and then to the body named in its final response, at no cost to the complainant, and any party claiming a licence can be checked on the regulator's public register reached through the authority's own site rather than through a link the caller supplies.