A crypto answer for your fraud team
Block Audit Custom Care for financial institutions
Your fraud investigators are good at what they do. Almost none of them are blockchain analysts, and none of them should have to be. Custom Care is a force multiplier for the team you already have: we take the trace starting points they send us, do the on-chain work, and hand back something your customer can walk into a police station with.
The moment this is about
A customer calls to say their savings went to a crypto investment that turned out not to exist.
It is one of the worst days of their life, and it is happening on your phone line. The money has already left the institution, moved through an exchange or a kiosk, and is somewhere your systems cannot see. Your investigator can confirm the wire went out. After that, most bank investigative staff are unequipped to respond to a crypto complaint, and the honest answer available to them is that this is not something the bank can follow.
Reputational damage and litigation exposure are significant. Banks are routinely settling lawsuits where they appear to have failed their duty of care to vulnerable customers, and the customer who was told that nobody could help them is the customer whose account of that call ends up in front of somebody else.
What a bank does in that hour is what the customer remembers about the bank, and what a bank can show it did in that hour is what the institution has to stand on afterwards. There is a large difference between a fraud team that says the trail is beyond us and a fraud team that says we have had it examined and here is where it went.
What your frontline can say
The referral is one sentence, and your staff need no crypto knowledge to give it.
We are sorry this happened to you. We work with a cryptocurrency forensics firm that will examine where your funds went, and give you a letter written for your local police department.
Why this matters
Four reasons an institution subscribes, in the order boards tend to ask about them.
Demonstrate duty of care
A documented forensic response, on file, showing the institution acted on the customer's report rather than closing it.
Reduce litigation exposure
A professional examination of the loss, and a letter the customer can take to law enforcement, is a materially different record from a complaint that went nowhere.
Protect your reputation
What a bank does in that hour is what the customer tells their family, their local paper, and everyone who asks whether they should bank with you.
No burden on your staff
Your team sends the starting points and keeps the customer relationship. The blockchain work is ours, and nobody at the bank has to learn it.
How it works
Your team keeps the customer relationship. We do the blockchain work behind them.
- Your institution subscribes to Block Audit Custom Care.
- Your fraud investigators receive a standing link of their own.
- A customer reports a crypto loss, and your investigator sends us the trace starting points through that link. Transaction hashes, destination addresses, dates, amounts. Nothing your team has to interpret.
- Our examiners trace the funds and classify the case by how far the trail can be followed.
- The completed triage letter is delivered to your institution through the portal. You deliver it to your customer.
- Any agency taking action on a matter we have triaged is entitled to a complimentary thirty minute consultation with The Block Audit.
What the triage returns
Every referral ends in one of three outcomes, and one of them is a straight no.
Direct attribution
The funds reach a known exchange within a few hops. The letter names the destination, explains the path in language an investigator can use, and carries subpoena guidance ready for the agency that receives it.
Obfuscated, trail cold
The trail cannot be followed further. We say so plainly rather than selling further work. Your customer gets the one thing nobody else has given them, which is a professional who looked and told them the truth.
Actionable but complex
The path runs through laundering tactics and commingled funds that need detailed tracing. Full forensic services are offered to the investigating agency, and your institution may choose to cover that work on the customer's behalf.
How the letter states it
- Direct Attribution: Specific assets traced to identified VASP destinations at a forensic-level standard.
- Effectively Obfuscated: Advanced techniques or services obscured the flow of funds; recovery is not feasible.
- Basic Trace: Asset flow identified to known VASPs; standard-complexity follow-on analysis required to support legal action.
- Advanced Trace: Asset flow identified to known VASPs; advanced-complexity follow-on analysis required to support legal action.
- Wallet Monitoring: Assets remain on chain in identified wallets; ongoing monitoring required to resume the trace.
The classification is a statement about the trail, not about how hard we tried.
Exposure analysis
Every triage letter carries an exposure assessment: where the funds appear to have arrived, and whether anything is workable right now. A fuller Exposure Analysis, going wider than one customer's loss, is a separate piece of work your institution can ask for rather than something bundled into every referral.
Your customer stays yours
The Block Audit does not interact with victims directly. Completed triage letters are delivered to your institution through the portal, and you deliver them to your customer under your own name. If a matter warrants a full forensic engagement, that work proceeds only at the request of your institution or a law enforcement agency. We do not solicit work or payment from victims.
The handoff
A letter nobody can act on is a letter that changed nothing.
The letter is addressed to the agency that will receive it, and it is written to be used. Law enforcement is the only party that can compel records, freeze an account, or seize funds from a virtual asset service provider, so the whole document is built to put an agency in a position to do that.
Any law enforcement agency taking action on a matter we have triaged is entitled to a complimentary thirty minute consultation with The Block Audit, to review the findings and discuss appropriate next steps. It is in the letter, and it is offered to the receiving agency whether or not anyone asks us for anything further.
Where the case needs a full forensic report, your institution can commission one, or leave that decision to the investigating agency. Neither is assumed and neither is required.
The subscription
What an institution is buying, in plain words.
Block Audit Custom Care is an annual subscription. It includes a triage letter each month, and monthly crypto advisory time for your investigative team to spend on live questions as they come up rather than on a course nobody has time for.
Where a month brings more crypto complaints than the subscription covers, additional triage letters are provided on a per letter basis. Terms are set out in a proposal prepared for your institution, and nothing on this page is a quotation.
Who it serves
- Your customer gets a real answer on the worst day of their year, from the institution they trusted with the money.
- Your fraud team gets crypto capability without hiring for it, and keeps the customer relationship throughout.
- Law enforcement receives a triaged case with somewhere to start instead of a report they cannot act on.
Request a subscription proposal
Tell us who handles crypto reports today and roughly how many you see. We will prepare a proposal and walk your team through how a referral works.
Pressing send delivers your message directly to our team. We use what you enter here to respond to you, and for nothing else.