Over several months, a self-employed professional in her fifties was guided into what looked like a sophisticated cryptocurrency trading platform by someone she had met on a messaging app. By the time she contacted CryptoCISO, she had moved a six-figure sum in USDT and Bitcoin into wallets the platform controlled, and every withdrawal request was met with a new fee.
What we found. This is the classic pattern of a pig-butchering (sha zhu pan) operation: a long grooming period, a cloned trading interface showing fake gains, and a withdrawal wall designed to extract more money. The platform was never an exchange — it was a deposit funnel.
What we did.
- Reconstructed the full deposit timeline from the client wallet and exchange records.
- Traced the outgoing USDT across the chain as it was split, bridged and consolidated.
- Identified the off-ramp: deposit addresses belonging to a regulated, KYC exchange.
- Packaged the on-chain evidence into a report suitable for the exchange compliance team and law enforcement.
The outcome. Because a meaningful portion of the funds had not yet been cashed out, the exchange was able to freeze the linked balances pending investigation while the report moved through law-enforcement channels. Tracing never guarantees return — but money that is still identifiable, and still on a regulated platform, is money that can be acted on.
The takeaway. Speed matters. The sooner stolen crypto is traced to a compliant off-ramp, the better the odds a freeze request lands before the funds are withdrawn. If a platform charges a fee to release your own withdrawal, it is not an exchange — it is a scam, and the clock is already running.
Client and identifying details have been anonymized to protect confidentiality. CryptoCISO does not guarantee recovery; outcomes depend on the specific facts of each case.