Your local police department almost certainly can't trace a wallet on a permissionless network. The agencies that can need a specific kind of evidence — here's how to build it yourself.
Why Local Law Enforcement Usually Can't Help Directly
A "rug pull" — where token creators drain a liquidity pool or presale funds all at once, leaving investors with a worthless token — is a real crime, but it doesn't look like the crimes local police departments are equipped to investigate. The transactions happened on a public, permissionless blockchain, often across borders, frequently ending at an anonymous wallet with no obvious link to a real-world identity. Most local departments simply don't have blockchain forensics capability, and even if the crime is reported, it's likely to be filed and not actively pursued unless it connects to a larger, already-active investigation.
That doesn't mean there's no path forward — it means the report needs to go to agencies that actually have the tools and jurisdiction to act, and it needs a specific kind of evidence to be useful to them.
Building the On-Chain Evidence Trail
Before filing anything, use a blockchain explorer to document:
- The exact wallet address(es) that received the drained liquidity or presale funds.
- Transaction hashes for every relevant transfer — the deposit into the project, and the withdrawal/drain transaction itself.
- The destination of the drained funds — trace where the funds moved to after leaving the project's contract. If they moved to a centralized exchange wallet, that's a genuinely significant finding, because centralized exchanges perform KYC and can, with proper legal process, potentially identify the account holder.
- Timestamps for each transaction, which help establish the sequence of events and can be cross-referenced against the project's public statements at the time.
The distinction between funds that stayed in self-custodied wallets versus funds that touched a KYC'd exchange is often the single most important fact in whether a case can realistically be pursued — an exchange deposit is a potential identification point; a wallet that's never touched a regulated platform is much harder to trace to a real person.
Where to Actually File
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3): the primary federal intake point for internet-facilitated fraud, including crypto scams — include your full evidence trail, not just a narrative description.
- SEC: worth filing if the token was marketed with characteristics of an investment contract (see our companion article on the Howey test) — this is a genuinely separate question from whether it's also straightforward fraud.
- FTC: ReportFraud.ftc.gov, for the consumer-fraud angle specifically, and useful for aggregate pattern-tracking even when individual cases aren't pursued.
File with more than one of these where the facts support it — they serve different roles, and a case that doesn't get individual attention at one agency may still contribute to a pattern that triggers a larger, multi-victim investigation.
What This Means for You
Document everything on-chain immediately — evidence on a public blockchain isn't going anywhere, but your ability to reconstruct the timeline from memory will fade fast. Don't wait for a "complete" case before filing; agencies often build larger cases by connecting multiple individual reports naming the same wallets or contracts.
Generate a formal complaint routed to the right agency for your situation, and use our blockchain explorer directory to build your evidence trail.
Related Kibbo Tools
Sources
- FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center. ic3.gov
- Federal Trade Commission — Report Fraud portal. reportfraud.ftc.gov