Victim to a scam (I gave my ada away).
I’ve followed the transactions to this hub. I guess other victims as well.
addr1qyw0l8fqz5hekcg78vzdghggty73852pj49mecrrs7q72vgul7wjq9f0nds3uwcy63wsskfaz0g5r92thnsx8pupu5cs6nw4w6
I guess somehow the coins needs to go to an exchange if they want to cash out… is it possible to know if an address belongs to an exchange or not ?
I really hope one of our more technical members can help you further.
Here is the IOHK’s page about addresses for either you or someone else to begin the conversation or research.
Best of luck.
Sorry for you, long story short, yes it is possible, provided someone – or some entity – spend a few resources toward that goal. It is already done on other blockchains. That being said, I can only encourage you to contact a few of the major centralized exchanges and ask for this address to be put on their blacklist by providing as much evidence as you can (date, URL, transaction id, …). There is no guarantee that the address belongs to them, nor that the scammer will use it directly but at least it will be monitored in some measure, and that can possibly complicate things for the scammer.
As an illustration, check this story out. And keep in mind, it’s a hacker, not a simple scammer, that’s makes him (or her) harder to catch. But on the bright side, Wasabi wallets and other CoinJoins are not impossible to track, it delays the inevitable. If not all people breaking the law are being caught it’s often not because they’re that good, not even because it’s so hard to catch them but more often than not, simply because they’re not that interesting to law enforcement ¹. In case you know for a fact that an address belongs to a given exchange and provided you filed an official complaint, you could ask for the assets to be frozen. Here is an example for Coinbase procedure, but major exchanges with KYC obey the same laws.
Similar to above, due to violations of our User Agreement, Coinbase may initiate closure of customer accounts. This can happen for a number of reasons including, but not limited to, engaging in prohibited activity as defined in our User Agreement. When this happens, buy/sell services are disabled and in addition you are no longer permitted to use your Coinbase account as a digital currency wallet. However, you are allowed to withdraw all funds from your Coinbase account and send it to any wallet address you choose, so access to digital currency is never “frozen” in this case. You are also allowed to clear any balances in a local currency wallet by withdrawing to a verified bank account before the account closure proceeds.
Note that if your account is closed in this manner while a buy or deposit is pending, the funds will be available to withdraw once the transaction completes.
In extremely rare circumstances, and only where required by law, Coinbase may block or “freeze” customer funds on our platform. We will take this action only when:
Note that some Coinbase products (such as the multisig vault and paper wallet) do not allow Coinbase to control digital currency private keys, and therefore Coinbase cannot prevent access to digital currency stored with these products.
For reference, the following link is the prohibited use section of our User Agreement:
Appendix 1: Prohibited Businesses and Prohibited Use
¹ that said, it’s not a fatality, instead of having dozens of sparse users filing complaint for small amounts against the same scammer, it could be « federated » and presented as one case with many zeroes. It has been suggested before, with ideas for lowering the costs, to no avail. Maybe for some, personal responsibility is understood as «every man for himself».