"Blockchain forensics" gets used to mean almost anything. It is worth being precise, because the difference between what tracing can and cannot do is exactly the difference between a realistic expectation and a fraudulent promise.
What it can do
Public blockchains record every transfer permanently and openly. Given a transaction hash, an analyst can follow the value forward through subsequent transfers, across bridges to other chains, and through the splitting and recombining that operators use to obscure the path.
Addresses can often be attributed. Exchanges use identifiable deposit-address patterns; services cluster; operators reuse infrastructure across victims. Attribution is inference rather than proof, but well-evidenced inference is what moves compliance teams and investigators.
The output is a documented flow of funds: where value went, which services it touched, and where it left the chain. That document is the thing that can be sent to an exchange, a regulator, or a court.
Where it stops
Mixers and coinjoins. Services that pool funds from many users and redistribute them are designed specifically to break the link between input and output. Post-mix attribution is sometimes possible with statistical methods and errors made by the operator, but it is frequently not.
Privacy coins. Monero in particular conceals amounts, senders, and recipients at the protocol level. A conversion into Monero is usually where a trace ends.
Cash and informal networks. Once value leaves the chain through an over-the-counter broker, an unregulated peer-to-peer trade, or a cash-based network, blockchain analysis has nothing further to read.
Non-cooperative jurisdictions. Sometimes the trail is complete and the destination is entirely clear — an exchange that will not respond to lawful requests. The analysis succeeded; the recovery still failed.
Tracing is not recovery
This is the distinction that matters most, and the one that second-stage fraud depends on blurring.
Tracing produces intelligence. Recovery requires an action by someone with actual control over the funds: an exchange freezing an account, a court ordering a transfer, law enforcement seizing assets. A private investigator cannot reverse a blockchain transaction. Nobody can.
So the realistic sequence is: trace the funds, identify a regulated party holding them, document the case to a standard that party will act on, and support the legal or law-enforcement process that compels action. Each of those steps can fail independently of the others.
What we tell clients
We give an honest assessment of which of these situations applies before anyone commits to anything. Sometimes the answer is that the funds went into a mixer four months ago and there is no realistic path. Saying so is part of the job.
Any firm that promises recovery without knowing where your funds went is not describing this process. It is describing a sales pitch.
Been targeted by something like this?
Submit your case for a free assessment. If recovery is unlikely, we will say so.