An Essay on Justice and Money Recovery

Justice Without Power & the Illusion of Recovery: Why Most Scam Victims Are Left With Nothing and How Chasing Justice Deepens the Harm

The pursuit of justice for scam victims has become an exercise in sophisticated futility. On one side, a burgeoning industry of private investigators and asset recovery specialists touts ever more advanced methods for tracing the digital footprints left by fraudsters. They employ blockchain analysis for cryptocurrency scams, subpoena internet service providers for IP logs, and utilize open source intelligence (OSINT) to piece together identities hidden behind layers of VPNs and shell corporations.

This technological arms race presents a stark paradox. The more adept investigators become at locating perpetrators, the more acutely victims feel the crushing weight of a system that remains fundamentally incapable of delivering restitution or meaningful accountability.

The first and most brutal reality for any victim is cost. These investigation services are rarely inexpensive. They often demand substantial upfront fees, sometimes thousands of dollars, and they are marketed directly to people in acute psychological distress. The promise of a high-technology hunt for the criminal is deeply alluring. For many victims, it represents hope, validation, and the possibility of reversing catastrophic loss. In practice, it frequently becomes a second exploitation and retraumatization layered on top of the first. Even when the investigator is legitimate, their findings usually lead to a dead end. A report identifying a wallet address, a suspected location, or a registered company name is a hollow victory without legal authority. Private investigators cannot seize assets, compel banks, make arrests, or freeze accounts. Their work ends where power begins. The result is often an expensive document that confirms what the victim already knows, while offering no path forward.

This dynamic is not driven by ignorance. It is driven by trauma. After a scam, victims frequently enter a neurological and psychological state oriented toward threat resolution. The brain seeks to restore safety, coherence, and moral order. Justice becomes a surrogate for emotional repair. The pursuit of investigators, lawsuits, and recovery services is often less about money and more about reclaiming agency, dignity, and meaning after profound betrayal. In this state, rational probability assessments are impaired. The victim is not asking, “Will this work?” They are asking, often unconsciously, “Can this undo what happened to me?” This is why intelligent, cautious, and otherwise financially literate people continue to invest time and money into processes that have almost no realistic chance of success.

Nowhere is this disconnect more apparent than in cryptocurrency scams. The rise of blockchain-based fraud has created a powerful narrative of hope centered on the myth of the immutable ledger. It is true that law enforcement has developed increasingly sophisticated capabilities for tracing and seizing digital assets. Agencies such as the FBI, the Secret Service, and the IRS Criminal Investigation Division maintain elite cyber units capable of following funds through complex wallet networks and mixers. High-profile cases, including the takedown of the BitConnect scheme and the seizure of assets tied to darknet markets, demonstrate that when law enforcement acts, the results can be dramatic. The public nature of blockchain records creates permanent trails, and with a court-issued authority, assets can be frozen and confiscated from exchanges.

This reality, however, has created a dangerous mirage for victims. If a scam involved cryptocurrency, there is a theoretical possibility of recovery, but it is almost entirely dependent on law enforcement action. Paying a private third party to trace funds is largely futile. A private firm may accurately follow transactions from the victim’s wallet to the scammer’s deposit address, but its authority ends there. They cannot subpoena an exchange, compel disclosure of Know Your Customer (KYC) records, or freeze withdrawals. Only a government agency with a seizure warrant can do that. The victim is left with precise knowledge of where their money went and absolute powerlessness to retrieve it. The investigator provides a map, but only the state holds the key.

Even when identification is possible, the legal system offers little relief. In the United States, a victim who identifies a domestic perpetrator can pursue civil litigation. Judgments can lead to liens, wage garnishment, or asset seizure. This path is difficult and expensive, but it is at least structurally viable. When the scammer is overseas, that viability collapses. A civil judgment against an individual in Nigeria, Brazil, Mexico, India, or the Philippines is effectively unenforceable. International law provides no global mechanism to enforce such judgments. Mutual legal assistance treaties are slow, politically constrained, and rarely applied to civil matters. It would require another civil case in the target country. The process can take years, require foreign legal counsel, and still result in no recovery. For most victims, the probability of collecting even a fraction of their losses approaches zero.

Criminal justice offers no better prospects. Victims may hire investigators who assemble dossiers identifying perpetrators with apparent precision. These reports are often handed to local police with the expectation of action. This is where momentum ends. Local agencies lack international jurisdiction. Federal agencies must then coordinate with foreign law enforcement, a process that is inconsistent, slow, and frequently unproductive. Receiving countries may deprioritize cyber fraud, lack resources, or be affected by corruption.

Nigeria provides a telling example. Once known for aggressive enforcement through the EFCC against “Yahoo Yahoo” scams, national priorities have shifted toward violent crime and internal security. A foreign cyber fraud case involving an individual American victim rarely commands sustained attention. The likelihood that foreign authorities will act on a private investigative report is minimal.

As a result, law enforcement strategy has shifted away from individual cases. Modern enforcement prioritizes large-scale disruptions: raids on scamming compounds, takedowns of money laundering networks, and multinational operations against pig butchering farms. These actions generate headlines and disrupt criminal ecosystems, but they provide almost nothing to individual victims. Thousands of people defrauded by a single operation are rarely notified. There is no mechanism to connect a victim in Ohio to the arrest of a low-level scammer in Cambodia. Restitution is uncommon. Closure is nonexistent.

This systemic failure produces a deeper psychological wound known as moral injury. Scam victims do not only lose money. They lose faith in fairness, accountability, and social order. When justice systems fail to respond, the injury deepens. Victims experience not only betrayal by the scammer, but abandonment by institutions meant to protect them. Each failed investigator, ignored police report, or empty legal promise compounds the retraumatization. Rather than healing, the pursuit of justice often retraumatizes the victim by repeatedly reinforcing helplessness and futility.

Many victims fall into what clinicians observe as a “completion fallacy.” They believe recovery cannot begin until justice is achieved. Grieving, emotional stabilization, managing trauma, and rebuilding are postponed while the victim waits for an arrest, a seizure, or a reversal that never comes. Life remains suspended. This belief becomes a trap. Recovery is delayed not by the scam itself, but by the hope that the past can still be corrected. In reality, healing most often begins only when the pursuit of justice is consciously abandoned.

The prolonged chase for accountability also carries neurological costs. Continued investigation reinforces rumination and intrusive thinking. It keeps the victim psychologically bonded to the offender. The nervous system remains in a state of threat activation, impairing emotional regulation and decision-making. Instead of restoring agency, endless justice seeking often strips it further away.

This is the reality confronting victims today. Law enforcement acts selectively and strategically. Justice exists at the level of press conferences and multinational raids, not at the level of individual recovery. Victims are left with detailed reports that go nowhere, judgments that cannot be enforced, and criminal complaints that vanish into bureaucratic black holes. The system was never designed for a borderless digital crime wave. The result is a profound sense of abandonment.

The SCARS Institute recognizes these realities. While victims understandably crave justice, SCARS also sees how easily that desire leads to re-victimization. For this reason, SCARS advises victims to report the crime and then disengage. If law enforcement can act, it will. If assets can be recovered, they will be. But in more than 98% of cases, no recovery occurs. Knowing who the criminal is does not ease grief, repair trust, or resolve trauma; quite the opposite. Recovery does not require justice to be complete. It requires agency to be restored.

Ultimately, every victim must decide for themselves how far they are willing to pursue justice and the possibility of recovering lost money. There is no universal threshold, and no authority can make that decision on another person’s behalf. Experience shows, however, that unless law enforcement is able to make an arrest or legally seize cryptocurrency through court issued authority, the outcome is almost always the same. Nothing comes back. Each new effort often brings a fresh surge of hope, followed by another collapse when results fail to materialize. That cycle of anticipation and disappointment can deepen despair, reinforce helplessness, bitterness, and intensify trauma rather than resolve it. Still, people make their own choices, even when those choices prolong suffering or cause additional harm. Autonomy does not disappear after a scam. What matters is understanding the likely consequences of each path, so the decision is made with clarity rather than illusion.

Turning away from the crime is not surrender. It is containment. Healing is not the absence of injustice, but the reclamation of the future. The rearview mirror cannot be used to navigate what comes next.

For scam victims, the question of justice is not abstract. It is deeply personal, emotionally charged, and often bound to survival itself. The impulse to pursue accountability is understandable. Loss on this scale shatters assumptions about safety, fairness, and control, and justice appears to promise restoration of what was taken. In practice, however, the systems available to victims rarely deliver what that promise implies. Identification without authority changes nothing. Legal judgments without enforceability resolve nothing. Investigations without power offer information, not relief.

The most damaging consequence of this reality is not the absence of restitution, but the prolonged suspension of recovery. Each new attempt to reclaim money or secure accountability can reopen the original wound. Hope rises, expectations form, and when the outcome collapses, the emotional impact often exceeds the financial one. Over time, this cycle reinforces helplessness and deepens trauma rather than alleviating it. The pursuit of justice, intended to restore agency, can quietly erode it.

This does not mean victims are wrong to want justice. It means the cost of chasing it must be understood clearly. Recovery does not require a perpetrator to be punished or funds to be returned. It requires stabilization, restored agency, and a future no longer defined by the crime. Reporting remains important. Accountability matters at the societal level. But for individual victims, healing most often begins when attention turns away from what cannot be controlled and toward what can. Turning forward is not denial. It is an act of self preservation.

Tim McGuinness, Ph.D.
January 2026

Glossary

• Accountability — the expectation that individuals or institutions responsible for harm will face consequences, which scam victims often seek as a way to restore fairness and personal dignity after betrayal.
• Asset Recovery Specialists — private firms or individuals who claim to help scam victims retrieve stolen funds, often through tracing financial transactions despite lacking legal authority to seize assets.
• Betrayal Trauma — a form of psychological injury that occurs when trust is violated by someone or something believed to be safe, leaving scam victims struggling with shock, self doubt, and loss of emotional security.
• Blockchain Analysis — the process of tracing cryptocurrency transactions across public ledgers to follow the movement of funds, which can identify pathways but rarely enables private recovery.
• Borderless Digital Crime — criminal activity conducted online across national boundaries, making traditional law enforcement jurisdiction and legal remedies largely ineffective for individual victims.
• Civil Judgment — a court ruling in a civil lawsuit that may order financial compensation, which is often unenforceable when the scammer resides outside the victim’s country.
• Completion Fallacy — the belief that emotional recovery cannot begin until justice is achieved or money is returned, which often delays healing and prolongs psychological distress.
• Containment — the intentional decision to stop pursuing unresolvable outcomes in order to stabilize emotions, reduce rumination, and protect long-term mental health.
• Court Issued Authority — legal power granted through warrants or court orders that allows law enforcement to seize assets or compel cooperation, which private investigators do not possess.
• Criminal Complaint — a formal report submitted to law enforcement describing a crime, which often leads to little action in international scam cases due to jurisdictional limits.
• Cryptocurrency Scams — fraud schemes involving digital currencies that exploit the complexity and anonymity of blockchain systems to deceive victims and move funds quickly across borders.
• Digital Footprints — traces of online activity such as wallet addresses or IP logs that investigators can identify but cannot act upon without enforcement authority.
• Emotional Repair — the psychological process of restoring a sense of safety, dignity, and coherence after trauma, which victims may mistakenly seek through justice efforts.
• Enforceability — the practical ability to carry out a legal judgment or ruling, which is usually absent when scammers operate in foreign jurisdictions.
• False Hope Cycle — the repeated pattern of rising expectations followed by disappointment that occurs when victims pursue recovery options that cannot realistically succeed.
• Foreign Jurisdiction — the legal authority of another country, which limits the ability of domestic courts or police to act against overseas scammers.
• High Profile Takedowns — large-scale law enforcement operations targeting scam networks that generate publicity but rarely provide restitution or closure for individual victims.
• Identification Without Authority — the condition in which a perpetrator is known but cannot be acted against legally, leaving victims informed but powerless.
• Institutional Abandonment — the experience of feeling unsupported by systems meant to provide protection or justice, which intensifies trauma for scam victims.
• International Law — the framework governing cooperation between nations, which offers limited and slow mechanisms for addressing individual fraud cases.
• Investigation Services — private entities that conduct research into scams and perpetrators, often marketed to distressed victims despite lacking enforcement power.
• Justice Seeking Behavior — actions taken by victims to pursue accountability or restitution, frequently driven by trauma rather than realistic outcomes.
• Legal Authority — the power to compel action through courts or law enforcement, which is essential for asset seizure but unavailable to private parties.
• Moral Injury — deep psychological harm caused by the violation of moral expectations, such as fairness and accountability, often intensified when justice systems fail to respond.
• Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties — international agreements that enable cooperation between governments, which are slow and rarely effective for individual scam cases.
• Neurological Threat Activation — a state in which the nervous system remains alert and stressed, impairing emotional regulation and rational decision making after trauma.
• Open Source Intelligence — publicly available information used to investigate online activity, which can identify patterns but does not enable enforcement.
• Powerlessness — the emotional state resulting from knowing what happened but being unable to change it, commonly experienced by scam victims after investigations fail.
• Press Conference Justice — symbolic displays of enforcement success that emphasize large-scale actions rather than meaningful outcomes for individual victims.
• Private Investigators — professionals hired to gather information about scams or perpetrators, whose role ends at analysis rather than enforcement.
• Probability Impairment — the reduced ability to realistically assess chances of success when under emotional distress, leading victims to pursue unlikely recovery paths.
• Psychological Bonding to the Offender — the continued mental fixation on the scammer through investigation and rumination, which prolongs emotional harm.
• Recovery Delay — the postponement of healing and rebuilding caused by waiting for justice or restitution that may never occur.
• Restitution — the return of stolen money or compensation for losses, which is rare in international scam cases and should not be assumed.
• Retraumatization — the intensification of trauma symptoms caused by repeated exposure to disappointment, false promises, or unresolved justice efforts.
• Rumination — repetitive and intrusive thinking about the scam or offender that keeps victims emotionally trapped in the event.
• Second Exploitation — harm that occurs when victims are financially or emotionally taken advantage of again through ineffective recovery services.
• Selective Law Enforcement — the prioritization of large-scale or strategic cases over individual victim complaints, leaving many reports unresolved.
• Shell Corporations — business entities used to conceal identities and financial activity, making enforcement and recovery more difficult.
• Sophisticated Futility — the condition in which advanced investigative tools produce detailed information without leading to meaningful outcomes.
• Systemic Failure — the inability of legal and enforcement systems to respond effectively to widespread online fraud affecting individual victims.
• Threat Resolution State — a trauma-driven mental condition in which the brain seeks to undo harm or restore safety, often through justice pursuits.
• Unenforceable Judgments — legal rulings that cannot be acted upon due to jurisdictional or practical barriers, common in overseas scam cases.
• Victim Autonomy — the retained ability of scam victims to make personal choices about their response, even when those choices may increase harm.
• Victim Re-Victimization — the process by which scam victims suffer additional harm through false recovery promises or repeated disappointment.