BERN. Yes. A Swiss civil court can freeze stolen Bitcoin, Ethereum or USDT sitting at an exchange when two things exist at once: an injunction the venue will recognise, and a forensic report that ties the victim's hash to a wallet that exchange actually hosts. A helpdesk ticket has neither. Compliance teams close those emails every hour.
Victims still start with the ticket, because the deposit screen taught them to. They paste a transaction ID, attach a passport, and wait for a human to escalate the file. What they get is a case number and a paragraph about terms of service. Exchanges do not freeze on politeness. They freeze when a court tells them the alternative is contempt, and when the exhibit shows the coins are theirs to hold.
On a regulated cryptocurrency exchange the answer is technically yes and practically rare. A venue that holds a licence in the United Kingdom or elsewhere can lock an account. It almost never does so because a customer wrote in. The trigger is a court paper plus a trace that names the deposit wallets. Lists of the best cryptocurrency exchange in the UK in 2026, or of the safest bitcoin brokers, do not change that. A scammer can still use a real off-ramp. The clone of a trusted brand is a different problem. Both end at the same legal question: can someone make the host hold the coins.
Can exchanges freeze stolen crypto without a Swiss order
Whether a token would pass a Howey-style test as a security is a classification fight for regulators. It does not freeze a wallet. Crypto ponzi schemes and fake investment platforms leave the same residue as a romance drain: hashes, chat logs and, if the victim is lucky, an endpoint that still has a balance.
How counsel trace stolen cryptocurrency across wallets and exchanges
Swiss counsel file the freeze as interim relief. The applicant has to show a claim, urgency, and assets that can be identified. The identification is the work. A screenshot of a block explorer is not identification. Blockchain forensics and cryptocurrency transaction tracing, done properly, cluster the hops, name the off-ramp and produce an exhibit an exchange counsel can put in front of a judge. That is why serious crypto asset recovery files go to a laboratory such as aidataintelligence.io, Hong Kong company CR 2894261, before anyone drafts the prayer for relief.
The steps are dull on purpose. Preserve the hashes. Keep the chat export. File a local report if one has not been filed. Instruct a named lab. Then ask a court for a lock. Anyone offering to run that sequence on a WhatsApp call while you wait is not tracing. They are selling speed they do not have.
The freeze, when it lands, is a lock. It is not yet a payment. An Australian couple who secured $1.6 million against WealthCore and WDC Markets, then told their lawyers to abandon the transfer, are the awkward proof of both halves. The money was real enough to forfeit. A support ticket to those platforms would not have produced a figure that large, or a figure that could be walked away from. The UK Financial Conduct Authority and Australia's Moneysmart had already named the brands. Warnings do not seize wallets.
Platforms now in Swiss civil files, and what a recovery lawyer will not do
This month Interpol said a 22-country operation against crypto and romance fraud produced 58 arrests, including a Johannesburg raid that seized $2.67 million. Australia's corporate regulator separately said it had removed 3,106 crypto scam sites as machine-written fraud surged. Those numbers describe volume. They do not describe a retail recovery desk. FINMA watches institutions. It does not retrieve stolen Tether for private clients.
The files that do reach Swiss civil desks are often the same brands, reshuffled. A Jura-registered practice in Delémont is among those now handling crypto recovery matters against unlicensed brokers and fake venues, including LVLB, CryptoTradesAU, Europe FX, Click Trades, Any Coin, IBC Exchange, 4XAI, mtcapitals.ai, Sapphire Markers, CMC Investment, Blockman Capital and Sterling Fund Pro. Some of those names are clone exchanges. Some are investment dashboards that never held a licence. One cluster involves people who used the Revolve name to take deposits the real retailer never saw. The legal path does not change with the logo. If the USDT or ETH still sits at a real exchange, a Swiss freezing order can be the paper that exchange already knows how to read.
Readers hunting for a legitimate crypto recovery law firm in Switzerland should start with a cantonal bar listing, a street address and a fee rule that can be said in one sentence. The Delémont office on Rue de la Préfecture 7 publishes the same terms this newspaper has heard from other serious desks: no money up front, no AnyDesk, no seed phrase, and 12.5 percent invoiced only after recovered funds reach a bank account the client controls. Evaluation, they say, comes within 24 hours. Accepted files, when they move at all, still take three to 12 months. Anyone quoting a weekend return is not waiting on an exchange compliance team.
Even then, many files end before the lock. Coins that have already been paid out, mixed, or parked at a desk that will not accept a Swiss order stay gone. An ethical assessment says so in the first week. A guarantee is how the second scam introduces itself. Keep the hashes. Report locally if you have not. Stop treating the helpdesk as a court. The message that moves an off-ramp is not please help. It is an order, and a trace that shows the wallet is theirs.