How to File an IC3 Report After Your Crypto Was Stolen

IC3 is the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, and its website is where people in the United States report crypto theft and fraud. Filing is free, takes around twenty minutes, and is done entirely online. It is best understood as a police report after a burglary: it rarely brings your own property back, but it is how a scattered set of victims becomes one visible pattern that somebody can act on.

What to gather before you open the form

The FBI asks victims to include the transaction detail, and a complaint with it is worth far more than one without. Have ready:

• The wallet addresses involved — yours and the one that received the funds.
• The transaction hashes, copied from a block explorer such as Etherscan.
• The amount and type of each coin, and the date and time of each transfer.
• How you first came across the person or site, and where you spoke — the app, the platform, the phone number, the username.
• Any website addresses involved, and the name of any exchange you used.

If you cannot find all of it, file anyway. The FBI's own guidance is not to delay the complaint while you hunt for missing pieces; you are allowed to submit what you have.

What happens after you submit?

Complaints are analysed and may be passed to federal, state, local or international agencies. You will not get a case worker, and IC3 itself will not contact you about your complaint — whether anything is investigated is decided by whichever agency receives it. That sounds discouraging, and it is honest. What makes it worth doing is volume: a single address reported by forty people is what lets an exchange freeze an account or a prosecutor open a file.

Do this at the same time

File with your local police as well, since insurers and some exchanges ask for that report number. Write to the exchange where the funds landed, with the hash. And know that the FBI specifically warns victims about recovery services, especially any that charge a fee up front — people who contact you after your loss are usually the next scam.

Once the report is in, resist doing anything else with the compromised wallet. If you have not gone through the immediate steps yet, the ten-step checklist covers them in order, and what to do if your wallet gets drained explains how the theft most likely happened.