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The Recovery Service Screening Sheet

Score anybody offering to get your crypto back, before money moves. Including us.

5 min · built to be printed

There is an entire industry built on people who have already lost crypto once. It works because it arrives at the exact moment when somebody is desperate and every alternative looks worse, and the second loss is routinely larger than the first.

Fill this in for every person or company that offers to help. Any single flag below is enough to walk away, and most real cases carry several. The sheet ends by turning the same test on the company that published it, because a screening test its own author is exempt from is an advertisement.

Who is this

Name they gave, and the exact domain or handle

How they first reached me, and who spoke first

What they want before any recovery happens

The fee, and precisely when it is charged

One checkable fact — company registration, jurisdiction, a real address

What they said when I asked whether my case is recoverable at all

Walk away on any one of these

They contacted you. The strongest single signal there is. Nobody found your public post by luck.
They ask for your seed phrase or private key. No exception to this exists. Whoever has the phrase has the funds and needs nothing else from you.
They want money before anything is recovered — an unlock fee, a gas fee to release the funds, a tax, a validation deposit. There is always a next one.
They guarantee it. Whether a wallet is recoverable depends on what you still have, and that is not knowable before looking.
They claim to hack the chain, or brute-force a key from nothing. These are not services that exist.
They want remote access to your computer. The screen-sharing session is the loss.
They show a dashboard with your funds recovered, pending one last payment. A web page displaying a number proves nothing. Only a transaction you looked up yourself does.
They are impersonating real support. Real support does not initiate contact, and cannot move your crypto.
All of their credibility is self-supplied — testimonials on their own site, a stock-photo team, an "as featured in" logo with no article behind it.
They are hurrying you. Nothing about a lost wallet is time-sensitive, and urgency exists only to stop you checking.

What a legitimate one looks like

It tells you which cases cannot be recovered, in public, before you pay, and it will tell you no.
It never needs your complete phrase, and it can explain its method well enough that you could follow it.
Anything sensitive happens on your machine, in your possession, not on theirs.
You keep custody the whole way through. Nobody else ever holds or moves your funds.
It gives you something checkable: a name, a jurisdiction, an address, a published position.
It does not mind you taking a week to think about it.

How we answer our own sheet

Turned on ourselves, plainly. We never ask for a phrase — no page on this site has a field for one, and the toolkit checks that your machine is offline before it accepts a single word. The searching happens on your hardware, not ours. We never hold or move your funds, and the success share is settled afterwards, by you, from a wallet you already control. We publish the cases we cannot help with in the same place as the ones we can, above the price, on the Recover page. We did not contact you — you found this sheet.

And the criterion we do not meet, said out loud rather than left off the list: the licence is paid before the search, and it is not refundable. It is a licence for software that runs on your own machine, so there is no version of it that can be handed back once you have it. The mitigation is the free pre-check that comes first, whose entire job is to make sure nobody in the unrecoverable column ever reaches a payment page. If that trade does not sit right with you, do not buy it. That is a reasonable conclusion, and this sheet is doing its job.

If applying this sheet to the company that wrote it feels uncomfortable, that is the intended use. The longer version is How to spot a crypto recovery scam.

If you have already paid one

Stop paying immediately, however far in you are. The money already spent is exactly what the structure is exploiting.
Keep everything — addresses, transaction hashes, messages, names, the website.
Report it to your national fraud body, and to the platform where you were approached.
Expect a second approach within weeks, often from a "recovery of recovery" service or somebody claiming to be law enforcement. Victim lists are resold, and being defrauded once makes you a qualified lead.

Get the whole set as one PDF

Every sheet on this site is free to read and free to print, including this one — you do not need to give us anything. The PDF is the convenience version: all 9 worksheets in one file, formatted to print in a single go.

No email is sent — the download starts on the next page. We keep the address so we can write once, when there is something genuinely worth reading. Not a newsletter, and never passed on.

Educational content, not financial advice. This worksheet structures a decision; it does not make one, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy anything. We are not a broker, exchange, custodian or adviser, and we never take custody of your assets. We will never ask for a seed phrase or private key. See the full disclaimer.