Recover Money Lost to a Crypto Romance Scam

Scammers call the long version of this crime "pig butchering" – they fatten the relationship before the theft. At some point your partner reveals a talent: they trade crypto, and it made them rich. They offer to teach you, "so we can build our future together".

From there, the steps are almost identical in every case we investigate:

This pivot – the pig butchering romance scam – produces most of the large losses we see. If those steps match your case, the investment pivot page explains the fake-platform mechanics and the fee trap in full.

Sometimes, yes – and an honest answer stops there until we have seen your case. Whether you can recover money from a romance scammer depends mostly on where the funds went and how fast the trail is picked up.

Recovery follows three stages. Trace: every transfer sits on a public blockchain, so our investigators can follow your money across wallets, chains and mixing services. Intercept: to spend it, the scammer must eventually pass it through an exchange, and regulated exchanges can freeze funds when they receive strong forensic evidence. Stablecoins add a second lever – issuers like Tether can block stolen USDT at a specific address. Recover: a court-admissible report gives police, lawyers and the exchange what they need to pursue the return.

Your odds improve when you act within days rather than months, when the funds reached an exchange that verifies identity (KYC), and when you preserved your transaction IDs and chats. They drop when the money was cashed out through unregulated services, or when the case sat unreported for a long time. Even then, the assessment is free and the answer is straight. The same three stages sit behind everything we do to recover stolen cryptocurrency, whatever the scam type.

We can usually establish where your money went, and sometimes who controls the account it landed in. Full identification of the person behind the persona is never guaranteed – and anyone who promises to "unmask" a scammer for a fee is selling false hope.

The profile itself is normally a dead end: stolen or AI-generated photos, an invented name, disposable phone numbers. The money is different. Blockchains record every movement, and when your funds reach an exchange with identity checks, a real account holder sits behind them. Our investigators combine that on-chain trail with OSINT (open-source intelligence – evidence gathered from public records and databases) to build attribution that police and courts can act on.

Recoveris AG is a Swiss firm based in Zug. Our team learned this craft inside law enforcement, and we serve EY as a technical partner for blockchain analysis. The first step is the free Strategic Assessment: send what you preserved, and we will tell you honestly whether your trail leads anywhere actionable. If it feels easier to start small, get a free case review and we will look at the transactions first.