Is it fraud, or is it a dispute?

Losing money feels the same either way. Legally, the two situations could hardly be more different, and confusing them wastes months.

A scam means the counterparty never intended to deliver. The business, the platform, the returns, sometimes the person, were fabricated to extract funds. The problem is that they are usually anonymous, overseas, and unreachable by a court.

A dispute means the counterparty is real and identifiable, and something went wrong: a contract was breached, an exchange mishandled your account, a partner withheld tokens, a company became insolvent. The other side exists, has a legal address, and may have assets.

Four questions that usually settle it

1. Can you name the other side and serve them?

Not a username, a brand, or a Telegram handle — a legal entity or a person, with a verifiable registered address. If you can name a US-registered company or a person you could physically hand papers to, you are in dispute territory. If the "company" cannot be found in any corporate registry, you are almost certainly in scam territory.

2. Did anything real ever exist?

Was there an actual asset, an actual trade, an actual product? An exchange that genuinely held your coins and then froze your account had something real. A trading dashboard whose numbers were typed into a database never did.

3. Is there a plausible innocent explanation?

Businesses fail, markets crash, token prices go to zero, and compliance teams freeze accounts for reasons that turn out to be legitimate. Losing money on a bad investment is not fraud. Fraud requires deception about a material fact — and if a company simply lost your money running its business badly, that is a civil matter, sometimes bankruptcy, not a crime.

4. Is there money left to reach?

A judgment against an insolvent shell is a piece of paper. A claim against a funded, regulated, insured business is worth pursuing. This is the question a good lawyer asks first, and the one people are most surprised by.

Common situations, and where they usually land

Almost always a scam

• An investment platform that blocked withdrawals and demanded fees or taxes to release funds.
• Someone you met online who introduced you to a trading site.
• A job or task app requiring crypto deposits to unlock commissions.
• A wallet drained after signing a transaction or clicking a link.
• Fake customer support or someone impersonating an exchange, agency, or bank.

Usually a dispute

• A regulated exchange froze your account or closed it holding your balance.
• An exchange or lender entered insolvency proceedings while holding customer funds.
• A business partner failed to deliver tokens, equity, or payment under an agreement.
• An employer or client paid in crypto and then clawed it back or underpaid.
• A custody provider or fund manager mishandled assets you can document.

Genuinely ambiguous

• Rug pulls. If founders were identifiable and made specific promises to investors, there may be a real claim. If the team was anonymous from day one, it looks like a scam with extra steps.
• Failed startups that raised from you. Turning on whether the representations made at raise time were knowingly false, or the business simply failed.
• Token launches that collapsed. Sometimes securities-law exposure for the issuer, sometimes just a bad bet.

Not sure which one you are in?

That is the most common answer, and it is exactly what our free assessment is for. Describe what happened and it will tell you which side of the line your situation falls on, and what follows from that.