South Africa. Swiss counsel. Bern register 2018
The platform knew your bank balance. The second caller knows your loss.
Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu.A person is a person through other people. You are not alone in this, and you are not the fool of the story.
South Africa has lived through mirror-trading schemes and vanished exchanges before most countries had a word for them. If a dashboard, a romance, or a recovery agent has your coins, this desk reads the file.
What the loss usually looks like here
It arrives as a WhatsApp group with early winners, a trading platform with a JSE-sounding name, or a person who took weeks to become your friend before mentioning crypto. Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban and Pretoria all have versions of the same script, and the script is industrial. The people running it do this all day, in shifts, with manuals.
Report it locally first. A SAPS case number, and for larger losses a referral towards the Hawks' serious economic crime capacity, documents you as the victim of record. Check the FSCA warning list for the platform name. Keep the bank or card trail, the chat exports, and every transaction hash. None of that freezes coins at an offshore exchange. It is still the foundation everything else stands on.
What a Swiss file adds
When Bitcoin, ether or USDT still sits at a custodial exchange, a Swiss civil injunction, backed by a forensic report that ties your hashes to a hosted wallet, can ask a court to lock those coins. A support ticket creates a case number. An injunction creates a freeze. A freeze is a lock, not a payment.
The work runs in three steps. Trace: cluster the hops from the hashes you kept. Freeze: interim relief against a venue that still holds a balance. Repatriate: if funds move, they move to a bank account you control, in fiat. Only then is the fee invoiced: 12.5 percent. No recovery, no fee, and never an invoice in crypto.
The caller who already knows
If someone phones or messages you about your specific loss, offering to recover it for an upfront fee, a tax, or a "refundable deposit", you are hearing the second scam. Lists of prior victims are sold. The caller may speak excellent English with local fluency and may claim a Swiss or London office. Ask for a surname and a cantonal register entry. The room usually goes quiet.
Sascha Christener, MLaw, is a named attorney on the public register of the Canton of Bern, admitted February 2018. You can verify him before you write a word: the register is public, the domain is this one, and the desk will never ask for a seed phrase, a private key, AnyDesk, or a payment in crypto.
Sending the file
Write in English. Include what happened, the platform if you know it, the hashes or bank references, and your SAPS or other report number if you have one. The evaluation is free and confidential. If the file has no reachable endpoint, you will be told so in writing, early, rather than kept warm with invoices.
Report a case
Name, email and phone are required. Do not send seed phrases or private keys.