What to do if personal user funds are stolen? (Experience sharing)

Personal user funds are generally stored in exchanges, decentralized wallets, or hardware wallets.

There are two situations for stolen funds in exchanges: one is personal account theft, and the other is overall platform theft.

In the case of overall platform theft, your account balance typically won't change (those who understand know); personal account theft will result in a numerical change.

If funds stored in an exchange are stolen, regardless of the above situation, as long as the exchange does not go bankrupt, the exchange will generally compensate users, especially for major exchanges.

The situation of hardware wallets, also known as cold wallets, being stolen is rare, and we will not discuss it today.

Today, we will focus on the situation of stolen funds in decentralized wallets.

The assets in a decentralized wallet are stored on the blockchain, so if the wallet's assets are stolen, the wallet balance will directly reflect that.

Upon discovering that assets have been stolen, the following steps should be taken:

Step 1: If there are remaining assets, transfer all remaining assets to a major exchange immediately.

Step 2: Use a block explorer to track the movement of the stolen funds, and copy the hash of each transfer into a document for safekeeping.

Step 3: If you find that the stolen funds have been transferred to a centralized exchange, contact the exchange's customer service immediately and send them the recorded fund transfer details, asking them to notify the relevant department to freeze the asset.

Note: The most important thing about this step is to act quickly because hackers will not let the funds stay in the exchange; their goal is to launder money. Generally, after transferring to an exchange, they will convert the original assets into other assets or switch to another blockchain and withdraw immediately to complete the laundering process.

If you act in time and the exchange freezes this portion of the funds, the funds can be recovered.

Step 4: Report to the police. Each exchange has a "law enforcement assistance application" located at the bottom of the homepage navigation, allowing the police to contact the platform to apply for freezing and returning the funds.

Precautions:

1. Users can only trace their funds being transferred to the exchange or a certain DEX through the block explorer. The subsequent outgoing records can only be found by searching through the platform's outgoing records within a certain time frame.