What to do if you already got scammed
The useful thing to know first, because it changes what you do in the next hour: if you paid in crypto directly to a seller's wallet, the money is almost certainly gone. There's no reversal mechanism. No support ticket recovers it. Acting fast doesn't help, and anyone who tells you otherwise is setting up the second scam.
That's the bad news, stated plainly so you don't spend three days on the wrong thing. Here's the rest, in order.
1. Work out how you actually paid
This determines everything.
- Crypto sent directly to a wallet — no recovery path. Skip to step 3.
- Card or PayPal, direct to the seller — a chargeback or dispute is possible. Open it now; the windows are measured in weeks and providers are stricter the longer you wait. Be aware that the purchase itself breaks the game's terms of service, which may affect how the claim is handled.
- Through a marketplace, on-platform — open their dispute process now, before contacting anyone else. This is the case with a real chance.
- Through a marketplace but paid off-platform because the seller asked — the marketplace generally can't help, because the transaction they'd have to reverse never happened on their system.
2. Collect evidence before it disappears
Whatever path you're on, do this in the next few minutes. Chat logs get deleted, accounts get removed, listings come down.
- Screenshot the entire conversation, including the parts where you agreed terms — not just the incriminating message.
- Screenshot the listing or the offer, with whatever identifier it has.
- Record the transaction: hash, wallet address, amount, timestamp. Or the order ID and payment reference.
- Note the seller's username on every platform where you saw them.
Do this even where recovery is impossible. It's what makes step 3 work.
3. Report it where it actually costs the scammer something
Recovery and consequences are different goals, and the second one is often still available when the first isn't.
- The marketplace, if there was one. Even off-platform, they'll usually want to remove the seller.
- The community. The trading Discord or subreddit where you found them, through their scam-report channel. This is the one that has real effect: it is how repeat scammers eventually run out of places to operate.
- The studio, if a game account was involved. They generally won't recover anything for you, and be aware that reporting an RMT trade means disclosing your own participation in one.
When you post publicly, stick to what you can evidence: what was agreed, what you paid, what didn't arrive. Accusations that outrun the evidence get removed and hand the scammer a grievance to point at.
4. Refuse the second scam
This part matters, because it lands within days.
Anyone who contacts you offering to recover your funds — a "recovery service", a "blockchain specialist", someone who saw your post and knows a guy — is targeting you specifically because you've just demonstrated you'll pay a stranger. They ask for a fee up front. There is no legitimate version of this service. Every single one is a scam aimed at people who have just been scammed.
Block, don't engage.
5. Change the structure, not just the seller
The instinct after this is to be more careful about who you deal with next time. That's the wrong lesson, and it's why people get caught twice: the problem wasn't that you picked badly, it was that picking correctly was load-bearing at all.
The structural fix is not paying a stranger first. When the money is held by the platform until you confirm delivery, a seller who doesn't deliver doesn't get paid, and the worst case is a wasted afternoon instead of a loss.
That's what Stashhaven does: the payment is held, released only when the buyer confirms, refunded if the goods never arrive. Buyers pay no fee for it.
Whatever you use next, ours or not, the question to ask is the one from the top of this site: between paying and receiving, who holds the money? If the answer is "the seller", you're in the same position you were in last week.
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