Have you ever wondered why there are no (legit)companies that offer private investigation into CC theft?

So lately we (a detective with a qualification in cyber crime and digital forensics, a lawyer specialising in commercial and criminal law and an accountant) had a chat about a gap in the market that is “the investigation and recovery of stolen / lost cryptocurrency”.

Would there be a demand for such a business?

Without a doubt, there would be a huge demand. On every sub on an almost daily basis there are posts of people getting scammed and wondering how they can try recover their funds.

What options currently exist?

These people are generally at the mercy of the exchanges to try return their funds IF they manage to trace it. More often than not an exchange will not comply with this request for obvious security / privacy reasons.

Their only shred of hope is a police investigation and at that the chances are still pretty slim.

A private company with skills specialising in crime investigation, legal knowledge, court practices and accountancy...

Will that work? Unfortunately the answer is no. Why: Although there would be a huge demand it’s just not feasible.

The whole concept of cryptocurrency is barrier in itself against such investigation: ”a digital currency in which transactions are verified and records maintained by a decentralized system using cryptography, rather than by a centralized authority.

(1) Although the transactions would be likely traceable, it would be almost impossible to gather any concrete evidence. You could gather some circumstantial evidence such as “1 bitcoin went into X account and 1 btc was transferred shortly after to Y account. Unless you have an employee of an exchange verify this under oath, any of this evidence would likely be inadmissible.

(2) freedom of information/data protection/court orders: this would be a major hurdle in any investigation and prove almost impossible to overcome. Yes you could get written consent from a person to access their account but realistically, we all know how hard it is to get information about YOUR OWN account. Never mind someone else’s.

If you were to identify a suspect account this is where your investigation would stop. You would have virtually no chance of identifying the owner through open source searches in which case you would need a court order. Most countries will not provide court orders to private individuals for the purposes of criminal investigations. In many countries you are also obliged to law to report your knowledge of a crime to the police.

(3) Cross border investigation: by the nature of cc, it’s likely your investigation would lead to other countries or even continents: this would require the investigator travel back and forward between different countries frequently. It would also require numerous lawyers who are familiar with the local laws here.

(4) Seizure of evidence: on the unlikely event you make it this far, most jurisdictions don’t allow private individuals seize items (phones etc) as evidence. In the rare case that they do, you would be required to surrender the evidence to authorities.

So there you have it. Even in a basic case where your funds were transferred from one exchange to another, it would be impossible for a private investigation team to bring it to a conclusion. If you get a DM from a private individual saying they can help. It’s likely BS. Your best option is just report to the police…and hope.