Crypto exchange scam checklist by Zavialov Ilia Nikolaevich, made to be printed and kept

Why this belongs on paper

Everything here is obvious while calm and unavailable while excited. That gap is the entire operating space of the schemes described further down, and paper closes it because a sheet on a wall does not need to be remembered.

The moment it is needed is specific: somebody is waiting for an answer, an offer expires soon, and the amount is larger than usual. That combination removes exactly the deliberation these checks require.

Print it, keep it where transfers actually get made, and give a copy to whoever else in the household moves money. The second copy matters more than the first, because the person who gets targeted is rarely the person who read the article.

The list is short on purpose. Six checks, each with a yes or no answer, and one rule that applies when all six were skipped.

There is a second reason for paper, and it is less obvious. A printed rule is something a household can agree to together, and agreement made in advance is what survives a phone call. A person deciding alone under pressure will find reasons to make an exception, because the pressure is designed to supply them. A person who agreed a rule with somebody else two months ago has to explain the exception out loud before making it, and most exceptions do not survive being said out loud. That is the entire mechanism, and it works on people who already know everything in this article.

Check one: the address, typed by hand

Open the platform by typing the address yourself or from a bookmark you made earlier, never from a link in a message, a chat or an advertisement above a search result.

Compare it character by character against what you typed. Lookalike domains differ by a hyphen, a doubled letter, an appended word or a character from another alphabet that renders identically.

A valid padlock proves the connection is encrypted and says nothing about who owns the domain. Anybody can obtain one for a lookalike address in minutes at no cost, which is why it belongs in the column of things that prove nothing.

Answer required: does the address match your bookmark exactly, yes or no. Anything other than yes ends the process here.

Check two: who holds the assets

Find the clause that says where your balance sits. It is usually short, usually near the end, and usually the only part of the agreement that decides anything later.

Three words matter. Custody means the platform holds it for you and it stays yours. Pooling means it is mixed with everyone else's. Rehypothecation means the platform may lend it onward.

Marketing language is not an answer. Deposit, savings and wallet all appear in the marketing of products that were legally loans, and the difference showed up only in bankruptcy, where one class received a full return and another received between 15 and 72 percent.

Answer required: does the agreement allow the platform to lend or pool what you transfer, yes or no. If yes, treat the balance as a loan and size it accordingly.

Worth adding what this check is not. It is not an accusation, and a platform that answers yes is not therefore dishonest. Lending customer balances is a legitimate business model when it is disclosed, priced and consented to, and a great deal of ordinary finance works exactly that way. The problem is never that the answer is yes, it is that most people holding such a balance believe the answer is no, because the product was sold with the vocabulary of saving rather than the vocabulary of lending. Knowing which one you actually hold is the entire purpose of this page.

Check three: one document against its register

Pick a single claim on the site that can be verified externally, usually the license number or the company registration, and check it against the register it claims to come from.

Do not read the document on the platform's own page. The point of the check is to leave the site, because the fabricated part of a clone is always the part that was never meant to be verified.

The most common finding is a real number belonging to a different company. The second most common is a license that exists but covers an activity unrelated to holding customer assets.

Answer required: does the register show this company, with this number, permitted to do this, yes or no. Fifteen minutes, once, per platform.

Check four: the withdrawal you make on purpose

Send a small amount in, then take all of it back out before sending anything else. Not part of it, all of it, and then wait a week without depositing again.

This is the only test in the list that the platform itself has to pass rather than a document. A platform that pays out promptly when there is nothing left to hold is behaving differently from one that responds with a new requirement.

Watch what happens after the withdrawal rather than during it. Schemes frequently pay the first exit without complaint, because that payment is the cheapest advertising they can buy.

Answer required: did the full balance return without any new condition appearing, yes or no. A fee, a tax, a verification deposit or an account upgrade at this point is the answer.

Check five: how much is here and why

Decide the maximum before opening the account rather than after the balance grows. The number that hurts is always the one that accumulated quietly while everything was working.

Separate money that is here to trade this week from money that is here for any other reason. The first justifies speed and the second does not, and mixing them is how an operational float turns into a holding nobody decided to make.

Anything you would struggle to lose belongs somewhere you control the keys, not on a platform, regardless of how good the platform is. That is a statement about concentration rather than about any company's honesty.

Answer required: is this amount one you can lose without changing your circumstances, yes or no. If no, the amount is wrong rather than the platform.

Check six: the exit rule, written before you need it

Write down now what would make you take everything out, and keep the note. Withdrawals halted for more than a day, a new limit without an announcement, small withdrawals clearing while large ones do not, support answering a yes or no question with a paragraph.

The rule exists because the decision is impossible in the moment. During a freeze, every hour brings a reason to wait one more hour, and the reasons are individually reasonable.

Include the family version. If somebody else moves money in the household, the rule they need is shorter: no transfer above an agreed amount without speaking to one named person first.

Answer required: do you know today what would make you leave, yes or no. If no, the position is being held by inertia rather than by a decision.

The one rule that works after everything else was skipped

No legitimate platform ever requires an incoming payment in order to release your own balance. Not a fee, not a tax, not a verification deposit, not an account upgrade, not a liquidity contribution.

This holds at any stage and regardless of how convincing everything before it was. It is the single sentence that ends the scheme for somebody who missed the address check, the document check and the test withdrawal.

The structure never changes because it cannot. The displayed balance does not exist, so money has to arrive from outside, which is why the charge can never simply be deducted from the total on screen.

It also covers the second approach, the one that arrives weeks later offering to recover what was lost for a fee. Same rule, same answer, and that second offer succeeds more often than the first.

Teach this one sentence to anybody you would otherwise worry about, and stop there. The six checks above require a person to be calm, patient and reading a document, and not everybody will be. This rule requires none of that. It survives urgency, it survives a convincing site, it survives an official sounding letter, and it does not depend on understanding anything about how exchanges work. If somebody in the household remembers only one line from this entire page, this is the line worth it being.

What this costs the rest of the industry

It is worth understanding why these checks matter beyond one person's money. Public trust in the sector is already low: roughly 65 percent of surveyed voters report high distrust of cryptocurrency and only 20 percent say they trust it.

Every successful scheme deepens that, and it lands on businesses that did nothing. More than a hundred crypto projects shut down or went dark during 2026, and most were ordinary business failures rather than fraud, but the public reads the whole list the same way.

That is the practical reason to report a scheme even after the money is gone. A report gives a copied platform grounds to act, removes the domain for the next person, and adds to the record if funds are ever traced.

It is also why the checks are framed here as documents rather than instincts. Instinct does not survive contact with a well built site, and a document check does.

The page to put on the wall

Six questions, each answered yes or no, all before the first transfer. Address matches the bookmark. Agreement forbids lending your balance. Register confirms the license. Test withdrawal returned everything. Amount is one you can lose. Exit rule is written down.

One rule for afterwards. Nobody ever has to be paid in order to release money that is already yours.

One habit that makes the rest work. Slow down by one day whenever somebody is waiting for the answer. A real opportunity survives a day and a scheme does not, which makes delay the cheapest protective measure available.

And one sentence for the household. Any transfer above the agreed amount gets discussed with one named person first, and nobody is ever blamed for asking.

Put a date on the sheet when you print it and review it once a year. Platforms change their terms without notice, the custody clause you read is the one that applied on the day you read it, and a checklist that nobody has looked at since it went on the wall slowly becomes decoration. Ten minutes annually keeps it a working document.