ZachXBT: Canada’s Crypto Fraud Negligence Worse Than India or Nigeria
Onchain investigator ZachXBT said on June 13 that he is done taking requests from Canadian crypto fraud victims. Not pausing. Done. His reason was blunt: he believes Canada’s law enforcement response is worse than what victims get in India or Nigeria. I’ll be honest: that is the kind of accusation that sounds exaggerated until you remember who is saying it. Many crypto victims already contact ZachXBT after police reports go nowhere.
In his posts, ZachXBT said Canadian authorities often fail to prosecute offenders or seize frozen assets for victims. He also accused domestic media of avoiding the issue. “Canadian mainstream media would not dare to report about how Toronto has grown into a top 5 hub globally for cybercriminals, and that law enforcement fails to prosecute or seize frozen assets for its victims of fraud. I had to start declining all victims from Canada. Its government agencies may be more negligent than either India or Nigeria.” Most guides frame crypto recovery as a tracing problem. That is only half right. If investigators can trace stolen money and the state still does not move, victims are stuck with a map instead of a recovery.
For crypto investors, enforcement is part of the product, even if nobody wants that in the pitch deck. Canada is a G7 country. If victims start seeing it as an easy place for scammers to land, that weakens everyone else’s rules too. Why does this matter? Because stolen funds do not care whether the U.S. spends years arguing about securities or commodities. They go where recovery is slow. Large firms offering BTC ETFs, including BlackRock and Fidelity, need markets where custody works, freezes hold, subpoenas move, and seizures happen in practice. Otherwise the risk stays inside the market. Someone pays for it.
ZachXBT pointed to two cases. In one, he said Canadian law enforcement ignored a report about a phishing scammer who later moved into ransomware-style attacks against companies for millions of dollars. In another, he said authorities failed to act on evidence that had already worked in two other jurisdictions. My take: the second example is the sharper one. If the evidence was good enough elsewhere, why not in Canada? Blockchain tracing can be unusually exact. It can show where funds went, when they moved, which services they touched, and where the trail started getting legally useful. But a clean trail still needs someone with legal authority to pick it up.
This is not the first time ZachXBT has gone after people he thinks are letting stolen crypto sit. He has called out exchanges and law firms before. Regulators too. Last month, he accused Kucoin of shielding $13 million in stolen crypto from German investigators. He also criticized a U.S. law firm’s $71 million claim on frozen funds tied to North Korea’s Lazarus Group. The Canada accusation adds a country-level problem to that pattern. Crypto theft moves fast. Minutes matter. Is that dramatic? Not really. If a victim needs an asset freeze and a court order, delay can decide the whole case.
Canada is not ignoring cybercrime completely. That part matters. Toronto police recently announced “unprecedented arrests” in an SMS blaster fraud investigation. The RCMP has also publicized takedowns of scam operations. The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security’s National Cyber Threat Assessment for 2025-2026 flags fraud and ransomware as growing threats. So this is not about awareness. Counter to the usual advice, more public warnings are not the fix here. ZachXBT is saying the follow-through is missing, at least in the cases he sees. That is a different problem, and a harder one to brush off.
What this means
ZachXBT’s refusal to help Canadian victims sends a bad signal. We should not overstate it: one investigator refusing cases does not prove a whole system is broken. But it does show that even clear blockchain evidence may not be enough if local authorities do not act quickly. That is brutal for victims, and it hurts crypto adoption in a practical way. People do not just need wallets. They need exchanges that respond, courts that move, and a real chance of getting money back when something goes wrong.
Investors should watch what Canadian agencies do next. ZachXBT has used public pressure before to get exchanges and firms moving. If Canadian authorities stay quiet, confidence in the country’s crypto enforcement setup could take another hit. If they respond with cases, seizures, or clearer coordination, that would matter more than statements. For now, the takeaway is uncomfortable and simple: in crypto fraud, tracing the money is only half the job. Getting someone to act on it is the other half.