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At BlockchainUnmasked, we are frequently involved in cases alongside world class legal teams that reach what looks like the breakthrough moment. The stolen cryptocurrency has been traced. An exchange, custodian, stablecoin issuer, or law enforcement agency has restricted the assets. Sometimes millions of dollars are sitting visibly on-chain, no longer moving. The victim's question is immediate: when do I get my money back? A freeze is not a recovery. A freeze preserves the st

Two days ago, 594 BTC, about $38 million, was swept from roughly 500 wallets in 25 minutes. We flagged this vulnerability two years ago to Coldcard, local, state, and federal agencies. In 2024, several victims came to us with the same story. Bitcoin gone from a Coldcard wallet. No malware, no phishing, backups never left the safe. At first, we began to think this could only be an inside job. How else, in a properly designed entropy system, could anyone be brute forcing wallet

Four onchain security incidents this week. Roughly $36.5M in reported losses. We're not going to break them down, plenty of good teams already have. What never gets written up is what happened in the hours AFTER each one. What the triage and response is like. Who do they call? Detection is in good shape now. Blockaid, PeckShield, CertiK and SlowMist had all four flagged within minutes. That's real progress on two years ago. Response hasn't kept pace. Response runs on relation

FATF’s July 2026 report maps at least 84 public-private partnerships globally, the barriers that slow information sharing, and how those partnerships are evolving. The findings are familiar from live investigations, where delay determines whether funds remain recoverable. On July 8, 2026, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) published a new report, and this time the subject isn't a crime, laundering typology or a virtual-asset risk review. Information Sharing to Combat Illi

At some point in every expert witness case, someone asks you to raise your right hand. From that moment forward, every sentence in your report belongs to you. That's why I don't think AI is replacing forensic investigators anytime soon. It may happen, or it may happen as we are seeing with lawyers and AI, where the AI does the paralegal-type work, and the lawyer just signs off on it. Surely, mistakes will be made, but perhaps it can scale eventually while minimizing mistakes.

Blockchain Exploits and Hacks from the Advent of Bitcoin to 2026 Research Report • 2026 | BlockchainUnmasked • Research & Intelligence • July 2026 1. Executive Summary Since the launch of Bitcoin in January 2009, publicly disclosed hacks and exploits have drained more than US$37.88 billion from the cryptocurrency ecosystem across 2,173 recorded security incidents1 — a figure drawn from a live incident archive that continues to change as new events are logged and older ones

AscendEX’s continued silence is not reassuring users. Last week, on-chain investigator ZachXBT raised concerns around AscendEX’s reserves after users reported withdrawals being delayed for days — and in some cases, weeks — while deposits appeared to continue flowing normally. As of today, the exchange has gone nine days without a public explanation, even as new token listings continued to be posted from its official X account. BlockchainUnmasked took an independent look at th

A technical case study on fusing open-source intelligence with on-chain tracing to link two apparently unrelated victims to a single transnational laundering apparatus. Background We were working on a case for a leading North American law firm in support of a class action that, on paper, was narrow: a few plaintiff victims, one centralized exchange, and roughly a few million in combined losses. One day the law firm introduced a new victim whose funds had also landed up in the

The largest forfeiture in U.S. history produced a near-complete record of how $15 billion in bitcoin moved — while illustrating why attribution often requires evidence beyond the blockchain. Notes from doing the on-chain work on Southeast Asia's most entangled scam network. Among the constellation of Southeast Asian scam networks, most compounds are interchangeable points of light that blur into one another. The Prince Group is the moon — not one operation among many, but a c