Can bitcoins be traced to scammers

Question

Was scammed recently of €5600 .Was approached online and encouraged to buy bitcoin through coinbase. I had no experience of it before. Was told to send my bitcoin to a company address which I now know was a scam. How can I trace my money. Have proof of all transactions

Answer 1

Bitcoin allows users to transact pseudonymously, so there is no data contained within the blockchain record itself tied to an identity. This is by design, anything else would be terrifyingly Orwellian. Transactions are final, once fully confirmed in the blockchain nobody can issue a reversal or cancellation. As a bitcoin user, you have ultimate responsibility over your funds.

However, it is possible that external data can link an identity to an address. For example, many exchanges that convert BTC <-> fiat money will require customers to undergo a ‘know your customer’ (KYC) procedure, in order to satisfy the regulators of the jurisdiction the exchange service operates within. So an exchange may have a record of customers and associated addresses (but that would not be a public record).

This means that if the scammer stole your coins and then sent them straight to an exchange, there may be a record that could allow the authorities to find the scammer. But keep in mind as well: bitcoins are fungible, so while there is a transaction history that can be traced, there is no way to track ‘this exact bitcoin’ through time. So a savvy scammer may be able to obfuscate their transaction history, to the point of it being functionally impossible to trace your stolen coins through time.

Your best bet is likely to file a report with your local authorities, but I am sorry to say that in many cases there will be little they can do. Best of luck, I hope you are able to recover your funds.

Answer 2

In this post here: BTC missing after strange negative transaction I demonstrate how I traced a transaction to a known hacker wallet.

If you'd like to provide the transaction I wouldn't mind taking a look.

The short answer to your question is: Sometimes.

Answer 3

Now where the value is much higher and time passed it's worth to trace the coins. If scammers steal from several people then it's over time difficult not to reveal the privacy. This is because they move the coins around for obfuscation, generate change addresses and so they have to manage a lot of addresses which isn't nice.If they bring the coins together then they weaken their privacy.

The same if they go through mixer or to Monero forth and back, it only helps if they never bring old and new coins together. I saw people moving coins 300 times in a row for obfuscation and then they did a little mistake and all the 300 transactions were useless on the end of the day. The same I analysed a coinjoin wasabi mixer transaction where people were carefully by mixing three times in a row. But 22% of the output addresses could be linked to their inputs because the users weren't able to separate the pre- with the after-mixing world completely.

So my conclusion after investigating many cases is that the majority of people reveal their privacy earlier or later, then a tracing to exchanges is usually possible.