A small, senior bureau focused on one thing — getting funds home, lawfully.
cftrace was founded in 2014 by a former financial-crime prosecutor and a senior correspondent-banking compliance officer. We do not handle volume work. We accept a limited number of matters each quarter and decline anything we cannot meaningfully advance.
To restore lawful possession of funds wrongfully removed across borders, using only evidenced, court-recognised channels.
Every matter is supervised by a partner-grade reviewer. Every external instruction goes out under a counsel-of-record signature in the relevant jurisdiction.
Wire fraud, BEC (business email compromise), investment fraud, romance scams, crypto-laundering, and secondary-scam restitution. We do not pursue tax-related repatriation or matters with sanctions exposure.
Four-desk bureau: Intake, Forensics, Legal Liaison, and Repatriation. A matter passes through each desk in sequence with a written hand-off at every stage.
Four-phase repatriation process.
NDA executed at first contact. Conflict-of-interest check against existing matters. A senior analyst produces a written viability memo within 72 hours, covering jurisdiction, evidentiary posture, and a realistic repatriation range. No engagement letter is offered for matters we cannot meaningfully advance.
Bank-rail subpoenas via partner counsel; SWIFT MT103 reconstruction; on-chain analytics across BTC, ETH, TRON, and major stable-coin rails; counterparty KYC reverse-lookup; OSINT corroboration. Every artifact is logged with chain-of-custody.
Mareva-style worldwide freezing orders, Norwich Pharmacal / Bankers Trust disclosure, 314(b) information sharing in the U.S., and equivalent gateway mechanisms in EU/UK/SG/AE/HK. Preservation precedes repatriation — assets that move cannot be returned.
Funds are returned exclusively through regulated escrow accounts held by counsel-of-record. Audit trail is provided to the client. cftrace never receives client funds in operational accounts and never requests upfront wires for ‘release fees’ or ‘taxes’ — those are the hallmarks of secondary-scam fraud.
Repatriation outcomes depend on facts that exist before we are retained: speed of notification, jurisdiction of the destination account, counterparty cooperation, and whether assets are still traceable. We commit to a documented, lawful process — never to a guaranteed outcome.