How to Report Stolen Cryptocurrency to Authorities

To report stolen cryptocurrency to the FBI, file a complaint at ic3.gov, the Internet Crime Complaint Center run by the Bureau. Do it as soon as you realize the funds are gone. Then file a local police report and contact the exchanges connected to the theft. Speed is the single biggest factor in whether anything can be frozen: once stolen coins hit a centralized exchange, thieves move quickly to cash them out or swap them into privacy coins that are far harder to trace.

The FBI’s Recovery Asset Team uses a process called the Financial Fraud Kill Chain to flag and freeze fraudulent transfers. In 2024, that team froze $561 million across various fraud types with a 66% success rate.¹ The process works best when victims report within the first day or two, before funds pass through multiple wallets and off-ramps. Beyond the freeze window, early reporting also preserves evidence that degrades over time. Exchanges rotate server logs, phishing sites get taken down, and stolen funds get mixed through decentralized protocols that make later tracing much harder.

Gather Your Evidence First

Before you open the IC3 form, spend about 30 minutes assembling the evidence every agency will ask for. Filing an incomplete complaint wastes the one shot you have at investigators taking action.

The most important piece is the transaction hash, the unique string of characters that identifies the transfer on the blockchain. Open a block explorer (Etherscan for Ethereum, Blockchain.com for Bitcoin, or the equivalent for your network), enter your wallet address, and find the outbound transaction that drained your funds. Copy the full transaction hash and the destination wallet address. These are what investigators and exchange security teams use to follow the money.

Next, preserve everything around the theft itself. If you clicked a phishing link, screenshot the email or message, including the sender address, full headers if you can pull them, and timestamps. If a fake app or website was involved, capture the URL and any login screens before they vanish. Save text messages, Telegram or Discord chats, and social media DMs. Make sure the date and time are visible in every screenshot.

Then write a short chronological narrative. When did you last confirm the funds were safe? When did you notice they were missing? How do you think the breach happened? If a private key was compromised through a malicious browser extension or a fake wallet update, say so plainly. This narrative becomes the backbone of every report you file, so getting it right once saves you from reconstructing it later at a police station or under a form’s time pressure. Keep everything in a single folder, because you will be attaching these same files to multiple agencies.

File the IC3 Complaint

Go to ic3.gov and click “File a Complaint.”² The form asks for your personal information, the dollar value of the loss, a description of the incident, and the transaction details you gathered. Upload your evidence folder. When you finish, the system gives you a complaint number. Save it immediately, because the IC3 will not email you a copy later.³

Trained analysts review each complaint and forward it to the appropriate federal, state, or international law enforcement agencies. Set your expectations honestly: you will probably not hear back from the IC3 itself. The IC3 does not conduct investigations, and given the volume of complaints, the FBI cannot respond to every filing.³ You will only be contacted if an agent needs additional information.

That does not make the report useless. Your complaint feeds into pattern analysis that helps the FBI identify criminal networks and prioritize investigations. In 2024, the FBI’s Operation Level Up used IC3 data to proactively notify more than 4,300 cryptocurrency fraud victims, saving an estimated $285 million by reaching people before they lost more.¹

File a Local Police Report

A local police report creates the official property crime record that insurance companies, exchanges, and tax filings often require. Call your local police department’s non-emergency line and ask to file a report for theft of property. Some jurisdictions allow online filing for financial crimes, which can be more efficient when the case involves technical details a desk officer may not be familiar with.

Bring your evidence folder and narrative. Expect the possibility that the officer has limited experience with cryptocurrency; it is still common. Frame the theft in terms they handle every day: someone stole your property, here is what it was worth, here is the evidence. The blockchain details matter more to federal investigators. The local report primarily needs to document that a crime occurred, the approximate dollar value, and that you are the victim. Your goal is to walk out with a police report number.

That number is more useful than it looks. Insurance companies typically require it before processing a claim for stolen digital assets. Cryptocurrency exchanges generally will not act on a fraud complaint without it. And if you later pursue civil recovery through an attorney, the report establishes that you treated the loss as a crime from day one.

Notify the Exchanges Involved

Contacting the security teams at any exchanges connected to the theft is one of the most time-sensitive steps you will take. Centralized exchanges have the technical ability to freeze wallets, blacklist flagged addresses, and block conversion to cash. Stablecoin issuers can similarly restrict access to assets linked to illicit activity.⁴ They can only act if they know.

Contact both the exchange you were using and, if you can identify it, the exchange that controls the destination wallet. Most major platforms have a “Report Fraud” or “Submit a Ticket” option in their help center. Attach your IC3 complaint number, your police report number, the transaction hash, and a brief description of the theft. Formal documentation matters here. Exchanges are far more likely to move when a crime report backs the request.

Exchanges will not share the suspected account holder’s identity with you directly. That information typically requires a subpoena or court order. When law enforcement serves one, U.S. exchanges can generally produce activity logs, IP addresses, identity verification documents, and full transaction histories. This is where your IC3 filing and police report do their real work in the background: they give law enforcement the basis to compel those records.

Consider Filing With the FTC and Secret Service

The FBI is not the only federal agency that tracks cryptocurrency crime. Filing at ReportFraud.ftc.gov adds your incident to a national fraud database that state attorneys general and other agencies use to build cases against scam operations.⁵ The FTC report is short and largely repeats what you already told IC3.

The U.S. Secret Service also investigates the illicit use of digital assets, including cryptocurrency schemes involving fraud and ransomware.⁶ If your theft involved a large dollar amount or appears connected to an organized operation, contact the nearest Secret Service field office directly. The Secret Service does not have a dedicated online intake form for crypto theft, so a phone call to the field office with your IC3 complaint number in hand is the way in.

Filing with multiple agencies is not redundant. Each maintains its own database and investigative priorities. A theft that does not meet the FBI’s threshold for individual follow-up might match a pattern the Secret Service is already tracking.

Lock Down Your Identity

If your cryptocurrency was stolen through phishing, a compromised email, or a malicious app that had access to your device, the thief may have taken more than crypto. Personal information, login credentials, and financial account details could also be exposed.

Freeze your credit with all three bureaus: Experian, TransUnion, and Equifax. A credit freeze is free and prevents anyone from opening new accounts in your name.⁷ Change passwords on every account that shared a password with your compromised wallet or email, and turn on two-factor authentication everywhere it is available. If the attack came through email, check your sent folder and account recovery settings. Attackers often add forwarding rules or change recovery phone numbers to keep access after you change your password.

Pull your credit reports at AnnualCreditReport.com and look for accounts or inquiries you do not recognize. If you find unauthorized activity, report it at IdentityTheft.gov, which generates a personalized recovery plan and an FTC Identity Theft Report that carries legal weight with creditors.⁷

Claiming the Theft Loss on Your Taxes

The IRS treats virtual currency as property, so stolen cryptocurrency creates a theft loss that may be tax-deductible.⁸ The rules depend on whether you held the crypto as an investment or for personal use.

If you held it as an investment or in any profit-seeking capacity, which covers most victims, you can claim a theft loss deduction under Section 165 of the Internal Revenue Code. Three conditions must be met: the loss resulted from conduct that qualifies as theft under your state’s criminal law, you have no reasonable prospect of recovering the stolen funds, and the loss arose from a transaction entered into for profit.⁹ The police report and IC3 filing help establish the first condition. Report the loss on Form 4684; the deductible amount flows through to Schedule D.

The Taxpayer Advocate Service has confirmed that theft losses on digital asset investments are treated as ordinary losses and are not subject to the miscellaneous itemized deduction limitations that the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act imposed through 2025.¹⁰ The loss is recognized in the tax year you discover the theft.

For personal-use cryptocurrency, a narrow category since most crypto is held as an investment, theft loss deductions have been limited to federally declared disasters for tax years 2018 through 2025. Whether that limitation continues into 2026 depends on whether Congress extended the relevant TCJA provisions. Talk to a tax professional for your own situation, especially when the loss is large enough that the deduction is worth real money.

Civil Recovery for Larger Losses

Criminal prosecution is not the only path to getting funds back. Victims can also pursue civil remedies, and for larger thefts, hiring a private attorney may be worth the cost.

The core challenge is identifying who stole from you. If the stolen funds landed at a centralized exchange, an attorney can file a civil lawsuit against “John Doe” defendants and seek a court order compelling the exchange to reveal the account holder’s identity. The Department of Justice has used a similar tool, the John Doe summons, to compel cryptocurrency dealers to produce records identifying users who conducted transactions above certain thresholds.¹¹ Private litigants can seek similar orders through civil court.

An attorney can also seek a temporary restraining order to freeze assets held at an exchange while a case moves forward. Exchanges have generally indicated they will comply with court orders wherever issued. The practical reality is that civil recovery only makes sense when the stolen amount justifies the legal costs. Attorney fees, blockchain forensic analysis (typically several thousand dollars and up for complex tracing), and court costs add up quickly. For thefts under a few thousand dollars, the math rarely works.

What Recovery Actually Looks Like

Set honest expectations. The FBI’s 2024 Internet Crime Report documented $9.3 billion in cryptocurrency-related fraud losses reported to the IC3 that year. The Recovery Asset Team’s Financial Fraud Kill Chain froze $561 million across all fraud types, meaningful in absolute terms but a fraction of total losses.¹ Most individual victims never see their stolen crypto again.

Reporting still matters. Your complaint contributes to pattern recognition that leads to takedowns of large criminal networks. The FBI and partner agencies use aggregated IC3 data to identify and forecast trends in internet crime, which shapes enforcement priorities and resource allocation.¹² For the cases where the thief makes a traceable mistake, cashing out through a KYC-verified exchange, reusing a flagged wallet address, or moving funds slowly enough for the kill chain to catch up, your report is what makes recovery possible. And the theft loss tax deduction is often the most tangible financial benefit of reporting, especially on a large loss.

1
Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). 2024 IC3 Annual Report
2
Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Home Page – Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3)
3
Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Frequently Asked Questions
4
Chainalysis. Asset Seizure and Cryptocurrency
5
Federal Trade Commission. ReportFraud.ftc.gov
6
U.S. Secret Service. Combating the Illicit Use of Digital Assets
7
Federal Trade Commission. When Information is Lost or Exposed
8
Internal Revenue Service. Notice 2014-21
9
Internal Revenue Service. Instructions for Form 4684 (2025)
10
Taxpayer Advocate Service (TAS). TAS Tax Tip: When Can You Deduct Digital Asset Investment Losses on Your Individual Tax Return?
11
U.S. Department of Justice. Court Authorizes Service of John Doe Summons Seeking the Identities of US Taxpayers Who Have Used Cryptocurrency
12
Federal Bureau of Investigation. FBI Releases Annual Internet Crime Report