Crypto scam analysis — tracing funds on-chain
Slovak public television devoted an entire Reportéri episode to crypto fraud — V sieti kryptomafie (“In the crypto mafia network”), broadcast 12 May 2025. Pig-butchering schemes, fake trading platforms, and victims who lost life savings in a single click.
STVR episode description (Slovak): Počítačová kriminalita sa stala novou formou moderného zlodejstva. Ponuky rýchleho zisku lákajú tisíce ľudí investovať do kryptomien obrovské peniaze. Za vidinou úspešného príbehu o bohatstve sa však často skrývajú desiatky prípadov, kedy jediným kliknutím prišli ľudia o všetko.
English: Computer crime has become a new form of modern theft. Promises of quick profit lure thousands of people to invest huge sums in cryptocurrencies. Behind the vision of a successful riches-to-riches story, there are often dozens of cases where people lost everything with a single click.
We were brought in to trace where the money went.
What we did
For one case in the report, we ran on-chain asset-flow analysis: following transfers from the victim’s wallets through mixers and intermediary addresses, mapping how funds were split, laundered, and parked on platforms that looked legitimate from the outside.
Blockchain ledgers are public. The hard part is not access — it is structure: separating noise from the paths that still hold recoverable value, and packaging that in a form investigators and counsel can act on. That is the same analytics discipline we apply elsewhere — network tracing, anomaly detection, agent-assisted summarisation over large transaction graphs — pointed at a real fraud case with real money at stake.
The work contributed to returning funds to victims in that matter.
On Slovak TV
The episode runs about 25 minutes. Jürgen Wöckl appears in four interview segments:
| When | What |
|---|---|
| 18:02 | Interview — on-screen as cryptocurrency specialist, Vienna University (Slovak: Špecialista na kryptomeny, Viedenská univerzita); blockchain transparency and traceable transactions. |
| 18:14 | Interview — how scam proceeds move through mixers and intermediary addresses. |
| 21:42 | Interview — name banner returns; whether recovered funds can still be reached on-chain. |
| 21:46 | Interview — closing the tracing segment. |
Watch the archive: STVR Reportéri, 12 May 2025.
Background reading from STVR: The vision of quick profit lures people into crypto… (Slovak)
Full write-up coming
A longer journal note is in preparation: methodology, what mixers and fake exchanges look like in the data, limits of recovery, and how we combine human investigation with agent-assisted chain analytics.
For our broader take on crypto economics and fraud detection, see Crypto economics & blockchain.