Following the Money on the Blockchain

Blockchain’s transparency cuts both ways — it enables fraud in some respects, but it also creates an unusually traceable record that has helped expose numerous fraudulent schemes, as Felix Bick explains in Chapter 82 of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps.

Bick describes this dual nature directly: blockchain transactions are, in one sense, more transparent than traditional finance. Transaction flows between wallets are publicly viewable, and blockchain analysis tools can sometimes trace how funds move from a suspicious platform’s deposit wallets toward exchanges or other destinations, occasionally revealing patterns consistent with fraud, such as rapid consolidation of many small deposits into a single wallet, followed by transfer to an exchange for cashing out.

The chapter notes that investigative journalists and blockchain analytics firms have used these public transaction trails to expose numerous fraudulent schemes after the fact, though this analysis typically requires specialized tools and expertise beyond what most individual investors can perform themselves in real time before depositing funds.

Bick’s practical takeaway for ordinary readers is appropriately calibrated: for most users, the practical takeaway is not to perform blockchain forensics personally, but to understand that this transparency exists, meaning that fraudulent operations are not necessarily permanently hidden, and that reporting suspected fraud can provide investigators with the transaction data needed to eventually trace and potentially recover funds, or at minimum build a case against the operator.

This chapter offers a genuinely hopeful note within the book’s otherwise cautionary content — the same blockchain transparency that some fraud operators exploit also creates a permanent, traceable record that has led to real accountability in documented cases.

For anyone who has been a victim of crypto fraud and wondered whether anything could still be done, this chapter of How Not to Get Scammed by AI Trading Apps by Felix Bick offers meaningful, realistic context.