"It's gone" is the most upvoted wrong answer on this sub

Someone posted yesterday that he'd sent USDT to an address he had no access to. Nine replies, all variations of rip, gg, expensive lesson, future of banking.

Nobody asked what "no access" meant.

I did. It was his own old wallet, misclicked from autocomplete. Seven hours later he came back saying he'd found it on a phone he hadn't touched in four years. Nothing was ever lost. He just believed the thread.

Three things are actually gone forever: a mistyped address on the right network, a burn address, a contract with no return path. That's the whole list.

Everything else - your own old wallet, wrong network to an address you control, exchange deposit, missing memo tag - is a bad afternoon, not a loss.

We get this wrong constantly and it costs people real money, because they stop looking.

And the part that matters more than any of it: anyone who DMs offering to recover your funds is a scammer. All of them. There is no recovery service.