Is that crypto recovery service real?

One test settles almost every case: only whoever controls the address holding your funds can move them. If that is an exchange, the exchange can — through its own published process, at its own published price, from its own website. Nobody else on earth can, at any price.

So a “recovery service” that is not the exchange holding the funds is not offering a service. It is offering a story, and the price of the story is a second loss on top of the first.

Establish the facts before anyone tells you a story

Knowing exactly what happened to your transaction is what makes a false story obvious. The check is free, needs no account, and never asks for a wallet connection.

Check your transaction

Why you are being contacted

People who have just lost crypto are the most reliably targeted group in this industry. Posting about it in a forum, a Telegram group, a Reddit thread or an exchange's support channel puts your name on a list within hours. The replies arrive fast, they are sympathetic, and several of them will claim to work for the exchange.

Nothing about being contacted is a coincidence, and the speed is the tell: a real support queue is slow and a scam is instant.

The tells, in order of reliability

An up-front fee. The defining feature. Genuine exchange retrieval fees are deducted from the recovered amount or charged by the exchange itself, on its own site, after it has agreed the case — never paid in advance to a stranger.
They ask for your seed phrase or private key. There is no legitimate reason for anyone to see either, ever, for any purpose. This is not a warning sign, it is the theft itself.
They reached out to you. Exchanges do not DM people about lost deposits. Neither do “blockchain forensics firms”.
They promise recovery. Nobody can promise it. The exchanges themselves publish the cases they refuse — 3 of the 11 we track state plainly that certain deposits cannot be recovered at all. A confident promise about one of those is a lie by definition.
Urgency, or a “window” closing. Blockchains have no deadlines. Funds at an address stay there indefinitely.
A wallet connection to “verify” or “sync”. Signing a message can hand over permission to spend your tokens. Reading a transaction never needs a connection — this site does not have one.

What a real process looks like

You go to the exchange's own website, find their published article about wrong-network or wrong-tag deposits, and follow it. The fee, the cases they accept and the cases they refuse are written down in advance, by them, in public.

That is what we keep, with the source link and the date it was read, for every exchange: the recovery matrix · published fees · how we verify it

Compare whatever you have been told against the exchange's own page. If the two disagree, the exchange is right and the person messaging you is not from the exchange.

Cases where nothing can be done, and that is the answer

A failed transaction needs no recovery — the money never left. Funds at a stranger's wallet or an unreachable contract cannot be retrieved by anyone. Knowing which case you are in is worth more than any service, because it is what makes the offer obviously false.

What a failed transaction actually means · who controls the address it went to

And to be explicit about us

We are not a recovery service and never will be. We read public blockchain data and report what the exchanges publish. We never touch funds, cannot move them, ask for no account, no email and no payment, and there is no upsell behind any of this. If that ever changes, this paragraph goes first.

If that was not your case

If the transfer reached an exchange and was never credited, the answer depends on that exchange's own rules: what each exchange does about it.

No wallet connection. No seed phrase. Read-only — we never ask for one, and no legitimate service ever will.