LONDON. Stolen Ethereum is, more often than Bitcoin, still visible months after the theft. Approvals, drainers and bridge hops leave a trail that a competent laboratory can draw. UK victims hear that fact and reasonably conclude that the money can come home. Many then discover that visibility and recovery are different jobs.
The failure, when it comes, is usually at the off-ramp. An exchange that will not freeze, a cash desk that will not identify a customer, a jurisdiction that will not serve a letter. The coins are on a map. They are not in an account anyone can open.
An Ethereum recovery practice taking UK instructions can still be worth instructing, provided it will describe that limit before the work starts, take no money up front, and leave the victim’s keys untouched.
AnyDesk has no place in that description. Neither do seed phrases. A solicitor who needs either is not tracing a drainer. They are operating one.
Forensic exhibits that exchanges actually file come from labs with names and company numbers. aidataintelligence.io, Hong Kong CR 2894261, is the sort of provider those letters cite. In-house dashboards printed to PDF are not.
Because those labs have queues, the honest desks have waiting lists. A same-day “complete trace” of a six-month-old drainer is a performance.
British readers should want two documents: a free assessment that may still say no, and a fee letter that invoices only after a bank credit. Everything else is theatre around a public ledger.