Christian Moore has spent the last six years inside the Anti-Fraud Commission's digital assets unit, the team that coordinates with exchanges, custodians, and overseas regulators to trace stolen crypto and, when possible, claw it back. We met him at the Commission's field office to talk about a problem that has only gotten worse since the last bull cycle: investment scams that hollow out ordinary savers.
Herald Tech: What does the average case on your desk look like in 2026?
Christian Moore: It's almost always the same shape. A victim is contacted on WhatsApp, Telegram, a dating app, or LinkedIn — sometimes by what looks like an old classmate, sometimes by a "wealth manager" with a polished website. There's small talk for two or three weeks. Then comes a tip: a token, a platform, a strategy that's quietly returning ten or fifteen percent a month. They send the victim to a clone of a real-looking exchange. Deposits work. The dashboard shows gains. Withdrawals don't.
We call this pig butchering, which is a translation of the Mandarin term. I hate the name, but it describes the method: fatten the victim with paper profits before the slaughter.
What are the red flags people should be watching for?
If you remember nothing else from this interview, remember these:
- An unsolicited contact that pivots to investing. A stranger, or a suspiciously friendly reconnection, who eventually mentions crypto, FX, or "AI trading."
- Guaranteed or unusually consistent returns. No legitimate market pays two percent a week. Period.
- Pressure to act before a deadline, or to keep the opportunity secret from family, your bank, or "regulators who don't understand crypto."
- Customer support that only exists on Telegram or WhatsApp. No phone, no registered office, no regulator you can call.
How do people actually prevent this on a day-to-day basis?
Prevention is mostly boring. We tell people four things.
Two: separate your "savings" wallet from your "spending" wallet. Keep long-term holdings in a hardware wallet whose seed phrase has never touched a phone, a cloud backup, or a screenshot. Only move funds out when you have independently confirmed the destination address through a second channel.
Three: assume every unsolicited investment pitch is a scam until proven otherwise. That sounds harsh. It is also accurate. In our 2026 case data, 94 percent of investment-fraud victims were first contacted by the scammer, not the other way around.
Four: slow down. Every scam in our files relies on urgency. Sleep on it, tell one trusted person, and call your bank or the AFC hotline before sending a single transaction. We would much rather answer a hundred "is this legit?" calls than open one more case file.
Someone is reading this and realizing it has already happened to them. What do they do, right now?
First, stop sending money. Then, in roughly this order:
- Report to the Anti-Fraud Commission immediately. File online at detectiveblockchain.com/report. Acting early gives us a realistic shot at freezing funds at the receiving exchange.
- Preserve everything. Screenshot the chats, the dashboard, the transaction IDs, the wallet addresses, the URLs. Do not delete the apps. Do not confront the scammer — it only tips them off to move funds.
- Contact your bank and card issuer. If you funded the scam through a wire, ACH, or card-to-crypto on-ramp, ask for an immediate recall or chargeback and reference your AFC case number once you have one.
- Notify the exchange you sent funds from. Major exchanges have dedicated law-enforcement liaisons; a victim report flagged on the same wallet address lets them freeze any future activity through their platform.
- Lock yourself down. Rotate the passwords on your email, exchange accounts, and bank. Turn on hardware-key two-factor authentication. Assume any device the scammer asked you to install software on is compromised, and treat it accordingly.
- Talk to someone. The shame is the reason most victims never report. Tell a family member, your doctor, or one of the AFC's victim-support counselors. We keep a list at detectiveblockchain.com/support.
How often do you actually recover the money?
More often than people think. When a victim brings us a case inside a three-month window — before the wallets go cold and before the funds get cycled through mixers in non-cooperating jurisdictions — our team successfully traces and returns funds in roughly 80 percent of cases. That's well above the industry average, and it's because we move fast, work directly with exchanges, and don't drop a file just because the trail zig-zags across three blockchains. After the three-month mark the recovery rate falls off a cliff, so the single most important thing a victim can do is get to us early.
And the "recovery agents" that contact victims afterward?
Those are the second scam. Almost without exception. If someone DMs you out of the blue saying they can recover your stolen crypto for an upfront fee, a retainer, or "gas costs," they are either the original scam ring reselling your details or a copycat ring that bought your details on a leaked victim list. The AFC never charges victims, and we never reach out through Telegram, Instagram, or TikTok. Hang up. Report it. Then come to us.
One last thing you wish every reader knew?
The wallet doesn't lie. Every transaction you make is on a public ledger forever, and so is every transaction the scammer makes. We can follow it. We do follow it. But we need you to tell us it happened, fast, without shame. That's the entire job. Pick up the phone.