I lost ten of thousands of dollars worth of bitcoins to this fake bitcoin exchange from a romance scam in 2019.
These scam recovery companies just perform superficial recovery work. Examples include finding out who to complain to and who to request assistance from such as banks, police, lawyers, credit card companies, regulators, cryptocurrency experts e.t.c. and drafting superficial letters to them. Scam recovery companies only look up these organisations and contact them to get them to do the scam recovery work. Based on replies to client reviews on trustpilot, Mychargeback has even admitted to contracting actual professionals such as lawyers to write up legal letters (username "Stefan Harner") and as well as drafting request letters to police to investigate the scam (user name "Simon"). In these reviews their clients did not list any (real) professional work that was actually done by Mychargeback.
They might perform some of the recovery work themselves sometimes, but only when it is easy to do and doesn't require any professional help like looking up the destination bitcoin address of stolen bitcoins on the internet. Based on replies to client reviews on sitejabber, Mychargeback has admitted to only providing bitcoin "pathway and final e-wallet destination" (username "gabriel a.") for cryptocurrency recovery work. To the untrained eye, it may seem like they are conducting professional cryptocurrency work, but this is just superficial recovery work. Due to the nature of bitcoin technology, this information is kept on the bitcoin blockchain for the public to view. Anyone can look this up, even me. Mychargeback has also provided me with this "pathway and final e-wallet destination" service. However, i have found out the bitcoin transaction IDs as well as the destination bitcoin address where the scammers moved my bitcoins to. I have also identified the organization that received my bitcoins from the scam website. I have contacted customer support at this destination company and requested the identities of the account holders who received my stolen bitcoins. Due to privacy reasons, they weren't able to disclose this. The criminals did barely anything to hide their bitcoin trail which makes it easy to track using a quick internet search. I found out all of this by myself for free just by looking it up on the internet without having to pay mychargeback to do this for me. To do "professional"/"real"/"actual" cryptocurrency work i would have to hire cryptocurrency experts like what other scam recovery companies have suggested to me, and this is mostly for major criminals who try to hide their bitcoin trail through laundering because the crime is serious enough to get the attention of the police. Certainly not for small crimes involving small amounts of money in low level investment scams. Their claim of providing professional cryptocurrency forensics is false since none is required in my case.
What law enforcement agencies have trouble with is associating this "pathway and final e-wallet destination" with an identity to issue an arrest warrant. Mychargeback does not provide this service based on what they have told me about their recover strategies. This is because, as Mychargeback has said, tracing a bitcoin path is "designed to provide anonymity". To associate a "pathway and final e-wallet destination" with an identity would require actual professional work like forcing the exchange to disclose the identity of the bitcoin account holders either through the use of lawyers (usually not possible due to privacy laws) or the police (they don't normally bother helping people with "small" losses especially when law enforcement agencies in other jurisdictions have to be involved). Also, it is completely ludicrous how Mychargeback has tried to justify charging an upfront fee for writing up a complaint letter to the police in replies to some of the reviews made by their clients. Police normally write up a police report for you that stays in their system, free of charge. There is no need to pay anyone any money to do this for you. All of this is "obvious" and part of a person's general knowledge and can be done yourself. The only people who won't know this are people who are intellectually disabled or people who live under a rock or people who can't read and write. Any "professional"/"real"/"actual" recovery work is done by actual "professionals" such as banks, police, lawyers, credit card companies, regulators, cryptocurrency experts e.t.c. Clients obviously aren't interested in scam recovery when it only involves superficial and unprofessional cryptocurrency forensics, so it is imperative that their narrative is the provision of "professional" services in their propaganda
I found the way Mychargeback falsely insinuated professional scam recovery very insidious, upsetting and completely unethical. They didn't tell me how easy it can be to trace bitcoin history and insisted on being able to provide recovery services and getting me to sign a contract. They either didn't know that some cryptocurrency crimes can be easy to trace in which case they are incompetent, or they knew about it but chose not to tell me. Either way, they did this because they wanted to market the idea that all bitcoin transactions require professional sophisticated cryptocurrency forensics to trace as part of their propaganda which is obviously false. Since they have advertised "pathway and final e-wallet destination" to multiple clients like me and username "gabriel a." on sitejabber, it is most likely they knew it is easy to provide the "pathway and final e-wallet destination" of bitcoins involved in low level investment scams. As described above, i found the destination address of my stolen bitcoins just by doing a quick internet search. There was no need for any cryptocurrency professionalism in my case. Since there is no need for professional cryptocurrency services and relatively easy to trace bitcoins in my case, this would allow Mychargeback to perform cryptocurrency forensics themselves. This way Mychargeback can take full credit for providing asset recovery services which makes it appear as though they provide "professional" asset recovery. It is obviously silly assuming they are professionals just because they are providing cryptocurrency forensics themselves, but this is what they want you to assume.
Scam recovery companies avoid disclosing details of this work so they can lay the blame at your feet for not telling them you don't want this obvious rubbish service to justify keeping your upfront fee. I have not met a single scam recovery company that discloses these details of their recovery work before you pay your upfront fee. They will only admit this after you have paid your upfront fee. Furthermore, they will do whatever is in their power and take every available opportunity to insinuate "professional"/"real"/"actual" recovery services when there is none. Examples include advertising customer testimonials of successful recoveries. These testimonials are unreliable. Even scam websites produce them. An example of a scam website that uses testimonials is B4Binary. They have customer testimonials on youtube. A scam recovery company unsuccessfully tried to recover money from these people and the client posted a review about it. That's how i found out about this scam website. Their ideal client is someone who doesn't ask details and ignorant of the recovery process. This enables scam recovery companies to better able argue their innocence in reviews about them since the client is ignorant of how these companies scam people. To this day, Mychargeback still refuses to disclose the recovery process described above on their website and want to insinuate professionalism while admitting to contacting actual professionals to do the professional work for them.
Scam recovery companies will pass on any hiring costs of professionals, like lawyers, onto their clients either though the upfront fee or through an additional fee. Some scam recovery companies don't even bother hiring professionals and end up getting the "professional" advice they provide to you completely wrong and in contradiction to the advice given by regulatory bodies, such as in my case with another scam recovery company. Some scam recovery companies have claimed that lawyers have hired them to help recover stolen money from scams. I have not seen any reliable evidence to substantiate this claim or any evidence that the recovery work conducted is "professional", so i would treat this claim as rubbish.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has stated the following about asset recovery companies: "Although these companies sometimes claim to have elaborate asset recovery expertise, or even legal expertise, some of them do little more than draft a demand letter to the original scam artist and send a boilerplate complaint to the logical regulatory agency. Those are two steps that victims can take easily on their own, free of charge.". To find this search for "Investor Alerts and Bulletins" article on the SEC website dated August 9 2016. So far, the recovery strategy used by Mychargeback is similar to this description by the SEC.
As you can see, scam recovery companies are largely legalized frauds a bit like what you see in real estate agents, car salesmen, tv advertisements, banks, politicians e.t.c. The big difference is that the later provides something useful to society while scam recovery companies don't. This review should be taken seriously and not just with a grain of salt. Scam recovery companies also go around requesting for informative reviews like this to be removed to keep prospective clients ignorant of what they actually do. I have already had one of my reviews warning clients about this industry removed by Mychargeback on trustpilot with no reply from them. However, they don't remove critical reviews that aren't as informative and will reply claiming innocence since the review doesn't do a good job of showing fraud in the first place. An example is the review by username "Norbert" on trustpilot. This behaviour gives prospective clients the illusion that Mychargeback doesn't go around removing critical reviews and that there is nothing wrong with Mychargeback since these reviews don't do a good job at proving fraud. This behaviour is pretty typical of scammers. As for positive reviews, just ignore them. Virtually none of them disclose the fact that Mychargeback contacts actual professionals to provide recovery services or provides superficial recovery services when a professional isn't required. In a review about Mychargeback on sitejabber by username "gabriel a.", they replied and said they were "reticent at first" in taking on a case involving cryptocurrency due to the anonymity bitcoin technology provides. I am guessing they were also "reticent" for a second, third, fourth time e.t.c. when offering later clients, like me, cryptocurrency recovery services. However, they never appear to be "reticent" at all when taking people's upfront fee.
I later got real help from a professional hacker called ExpressHacker99 via email on ExpressHacker99(at)gmail(dot)com