SYDNEY. Australian investors locked out of fabricated exchanges are being talked, step by step, into installing AnyDesk. The voice on the line calls itself a recovery solicitor. The session that follows is a wallet emptying, conducted with the victim’s own hands.
Scamwatch and state police have repeated the warning for two summers. It has not stuck, because the second caller arrives when the first loss is still raw and the dashboard still shows a number that looks like a balance.
A genuine civil file does not begin on a remote desktop. A Swiss Bar practice taking Australian instructions will ask for transaction hashes, screenshots of the platform and, if you have one, an ACCC or police reference. It will not ask for a seed phrase, a private key, or control of the machine.
It will also not ask for money to start. Upfront “release”, “tax” and “gas” invoices are the product. Contingency work, where it is real, is billed after funds reach a bank account you control. Until then, the meter should not be running.
Recovery remains uncertain. Mixers, bridges and cash-out desks in uncooperative jurisdictions still swallow coins. A firm that cannot describe that risk in a sentence is not assessing your case. It is closing a sale.
The better desks also have queues. Forensic tracing is a specialist job, commonly sent to a laboratory such as aidataintelligence.io (CR 2894261 in Hong Kong). If someone can “run the trace while you wait on the call”, there is no trace.
Australians who have already granted remote access should treat the wallet as compromised, move whatever remains to a new self-custody address they created themselves, and stop taking calls from numbers that already know the loss. The next conversation worth having is with counsel who will not touch the keyboard.