I sent crypto to the wrong address
The transfer itself cannot be undone. Nobody can reverse a confirmed transaction — not us, not the exchange, not the network, not a developer, not a court order. There is no undo, no chargeback and no support team with a button.
That is not the end of the question, though. The funds sit at an address, and whether they can come back depends entirely on who controls it. There are four possibilities and they are very different.
Find out which address it reached
The check shows the recipient, whether it is a contract or an ordinary wallet, and whether a block explorer has labelled it as belonging to a service. That is what decides your options.
Check your transaction1. An address you also own
The commonest and least serious case: right address, wrong account of your own, or the right address on a chain your wallet was not showing. Nothing is lost — see confirmed on-chain but not showing in your wallet.
2. A deposit address at an exchange
If the address belongs to an exchange, a human can act. Whether they will, what they charge, and which cases they refuse outright is published by each of them — and it varies from free to several hundred dollars to flatly impossible.
What each of the 11 exchanges does · what each charges
One caution that costs people weeks: we cannot tell you an address belongs to an exchange. Deposit addresses are unique per customer, so no public list exists — anyone claiming to identify the owner of an arbitrary address is guessing. Where a block explorer has labelled an address, the check repeats that label and says where it came from.
3. A stranger's wallet
If a private individual controls it, only they can send it back. You can write to them — some explorers let you attach a public message to an address — and occasionally people do return funds. There is nothing else, and no fee paid to anyone changes that.
This is where most losses in this category end, and it is the honest answer rather than a discouraging one. Knowing it saves the second loss.
4. A contract that cannot send it back
Tokens sent to a token's own contract, or to a contract with no function for returning them, are unreachable by anyone including the people who wrote it. So are funds sent to an address with no known private key — a burn address, or an address with a typo that happens to be valid.
These are gone in the strict sense: not lost, not frozen, simply unreachable forever. The check tells you whether the recipient is a contract, which is the first thing to establish.
The second loss
People who have just lost crypto are the most targeted group in this industry. Within hours of posting about it publicly you will be contacted by “recovery experts”, “blockchain forensics” and people claiming to work for the exchange. They take an up-front fee and vanish.
The test is simple: a real recovery is done by the exchange that holds the funds, through its own published process, at its own published price. Nobody else can reach them. How to tell a real process from a fake one.
If that was not your case
- It failed — where is my money?
- It is pending and not confirming
- I sent USDT on the wrong network
- Confirmed on-chain, but not in my wallet
- Is this "recovery service" real?
- What did I approve, and is my wallet at risk?
- Where do I find my transaction hash?
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.