08/16/2024
7 ways to recognize fake recovery companies and what to do about them
We have seen a huge amount of people posting comments lately about scammers and insinuating that CipherBlade is in that group. It is disheartening because we are one of the few resources victims of crypto scams have to investigate the incident and collaborate with their local or federal law enforcement and attorneys to bring criminal and civil cases against these scammers, and yet additional scammers on social media that pretend to be us are confusing people at best and stealing more money from vulnerable people at worst.
Read on for tips on how to recognize scams and fake crypto recovery “companies” on social media, why we are different and legitimate, and what to do about the scammers.
1. They reach out to you and tell you they have already recovered funds for you
A typical pattern we have been seeing is scammers reaching out to victims, saying the have recovered a certain amount of money for you, and asking to be paid before returning it. This is impossible and always, 100% of the time, a scam attempt.
2. They pretend to be able to hack the criminals to get your money back
Funds are not recovered by “hacking the criminal’s wallet” or their exchange accounts. This just isn’t how it works. Most instances of funds recovery are brought about by a cooperation between investigators, law enforcement, and cryptocurrency businesses (typically exchanges).
3. They do not recommend you file a law enforcement report
Yes, some cases are solved without law enforcement involvement. Sometimes funds get frozen at a service that does not feel the need to wait for authorities in order to return clearly stolen funds. Sometimes a perpetrator gets identified and convinced to return the funds. But this is not the typical case, and people who pretend to work outside the legal process are scammers.
The typical case involves law enforcement and investigation companies working hand in hand: the investigators do the expert work that law enforcement doesn’t have the manpower to do on every case, and law enforcement requests the data that a private company has no authority to compel an exchange to disclose.
4. They impersonate a legitimate company by using a misleading domain name
We have seen people impersonating us in various ways that are actually easy to spot if you pay a bit of attention.
Some use misspellings. They copy our website and host it at, for example, "cipheblade[.]com". Notice how it’s missing the “r” in “Cipher”?
Some use alternative domain extensions. We own the cipherblade.* domain for many top-level domains (the part after the dot), but it’s impossible to get them all.
And some use domain names that just look related, for example something like “cipherbladerecovery[.]com”.
Also, always communicate by e-mail - and always, always pay attention to where an e-mail comes from!
5. They have no proper offer and engagement process
A legitimate company will ask you for sufficient data to conduct a preliminary evaluation of your case and then explain what avenues present themselves to tackle the case and what steps they propose to take, and make you an offer on that basis. We are, for example, happy to get on a video call with you and do a screen share of our preliminary analysis in forensics tools. Lastly, you will be sent an engagement agreement to sign with a real entity whose existence you can verify in government databases. When you are dealing with a scammer, one or more of these steps will be missing.
6. They do not publicly identify any team members
It’s always a red flag when people purport to work entirely in the shadows. Legitimate companies don’t do that. Some of CipherBlade’s team members are listed on our website and several more have public LinkedIn profiles, including our CEO Justin Maile. You can verify anyone that claims to work for CipherBlade by checking with Justin here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justin-maile-6174a944/
7. Their page looks fishy when you check the details
Have a look at the “Page Transparency” part of the “About” section of the page to see where the page admins are located. If it says Cameroon, Nigeria, China, or anywhere that doesn’t match the location of the (purported) company, it’s a scam.
If you check our page, you will see that our admins are located in the United States and Singapore. This is because we have a company in the United States and one in Singapore. You can see that the admin location matches the official address listed in the “About us” section and on our website - and you can, for that matter, even send us mail to that address.
What you can do to help
Ultimately, the best defense against scams is simply to know how to recognise them and to be vigilant, but there are some things you can do to throw sand in the scammers’ gears.
Report fraudulent pages yourself
There are at least 7 pages purporting to be CipherBlade’s which are not. These scammers will repost our posts. One of them has recently changed their logo to match our new logo and their name to match ours and even commented on our last post with a blatant BTC doubling scam before we hid their comments and blocked them.
We have appealed to Facebook to have these scam pages removed and provided proof that we own this legitimate business registered in the United States, with public members and owner, we own the one and only official CipherBlade domain (cipherblade.com).
Unfortunately, Facebook makes it a long and arduous process to get these obvious scam pages deleted despite this. You can help keep yourself and others safe by reporting these pages to Facebook. Click the three-dots button next to “Like” at the top. Then choose “Report Page” > “Scam, Fraud or Impersonation” > “Impersonation” > “Business” - and enter “CipherBlade”.
Please don’t report our actual page. It should be the top page with 780 followers at the time of writing this. The fraudulent ones we are aware of are the following:
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61554026397806
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61553746747627
https://www.facebook.com/CipheBlade
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61555892127544
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100092839691424
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61556727087514
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100084854500251
Report fraudulent domains or tell us about them
When you encounter a fraudulent domain that is used to impersonate someone (as per point 4 above), you can report it to the domain registrar’s abuse contact e-mail (don’t forget to tell them which legitimate domain is being impersonated). Or alternatively, just contact us through our website (cipherblade.com) or at our general contact e-mail address ([email protected]) and tell us about it.
