Bitcoin Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Bitcoin crypto-currency enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
There are now blockchain explorers that allow popular wallet addresses like crypto exchange aggregate wallets to be labeled with "Binance 1" or "Binance 4" for instance.
If you trace scammed funds to a "Binance 1" aggregated wallet, what is the procedure for asking the crypto exchange, Binance, to investigate the account owner for fraud? The likelihood for their support team to comply with your request? Should one seek legal counsel and the feds first?
The transactions involved in BTC deposit to an address assigned by centralized exchanges normally follows this path:
Bitcoin wallet of user ---> Exchange Deposit address for this user ---> Exchange moves funds from multiple hot wallets to cold storage address
These cold storage addresses are known for many exchanges and sometimes even hot wallets.
The type of address also helps. For example: if it's a legacy address starting with "1" you can look for exchanges that do not use segwit addresses for BTC deposits.
Possibly in it's activity, exchanges have quite unique transaction footprints and this can be used to make an inference. It's not an easy process however and there is nothing in the bitcoin address itself that indicates which exchange etc. was used to create it.
