According to the industry’s most prolific on-chain investigator, ZachXBT, most people expect the hardest place to recover stolen crypto to be somewhere without functioning courts or basic rule of law, but that’s not where the real problem sits.
He just published a ranked list of the jurisdictions he considers worst for handling crypto fraud cases, and the country sitting at the very top isn’t a war zone or a failed state. It’s Canada.
The Ranking, In His Own Words
ZachXBT laid out his bottom five jurisdictions directly on his Telegram investigations channel, ranking them in order: Canada first, followed by the UK, India, Nigeria, and finally a tie between Morocco, Algeria, and Bangladesh.
He was direct about what this ranking actually means for anyone reaching out to him going forward, stating plainly that if he’s contacted from any of these countries, he’ll likely automatically decline the case. He also revealed that an upcoming website he’s building will restrict access for users from jurisdictions he considers low quality for case handling, formalizing what’s currently an informal policy into an actual technical barrier.
Why India Landed On The List
ZachXBT didn’t leave his India ranking as a vague grievance, he backed it with three specific examples of what he described as genuinely unusual incompetence.
In the first example, he said Indian law enforcement contacted him directly asking for help unfreezing funds that had actually been stolen, essentially seeking assistance to reverse a legitimate freeze rather than recover from a genuine theft. In a second example, he described Indian law enforcement email accounts being used in an attempt to unfreeze funds tied to the Lazarus Group, the North Korea-linked hacking operation responsible for some of the largest crypto heists on record. In a third, he said Indian authorities arrested the founders of a centralized exchange because they mistakenly believed a phishing site impersonating that exchange was the legitimate platform itself. I think what makes these examples land as hard as they do is the specificity. These aren’t vague complaints about slow bureaucracy, they’re concrete claims about basic case fundamentals going wrong.
Why Canada Ranked Even Worse
What’s genuinely striking about this list is that Canada, generally regarded internationally as having strong institutions and rule of law, ranked as ZachXBT’s single worst jurisdiction. He elaborated on that ranking directly, describing Canada as the type of country that will receive a complete report on threat actors, whether tied to organized cybercrime groups, ransomware operations, or even home invasion robberies, with evidence strong enough to prosecute cases successfully in multiple other jurisdictions, and still decline to assist victims, all while the country continues to describe itself as a first-world nation.
He pointed to Toronto specifically as one of the current global hotspots for fraud activity, and cited one case where Canadian authorities instead seized TradeOgre assets from innocent users unlawfully, because they were unable to properly distinguish illicit fund flows from legitimate customer activity. This isn’t the first time he’s made this exact point either. He previously said Canada’s government agencies may be more negligent than either India or Nigeria, specifically referencing the case of Aiden Pleterski, Canada’s self-styled “Crypto King,” whose victims reportedly resorted to kidnapping and beating him themselves after the legal system failed to recover their losses, a case ZachXBT has cited repeatedly as evidence that Canadian victims are being forced to take matters into their own hands.
The Pattern Behind The Rankings
I think what ties this entire ranking together isn’t really about any single country’s culture or competence in the way it might read at first glance, it’s specifically about institutional response time and follow-through once fraud has already occurred. ZachXBT’s core complaint across every jurisdiction on this list is the same: he can hand over clear, verifiable on-chain evidence, sometimes evidence strong enough to have already secured convictions elsewhere, and still watch it sit unused while stolen funds move further out of reach.
That’s a meaningfully narrower and more specific critique than simply calling a country’s justice system bad in general terms. Crypto fraud investigations depend enormously on speed, since funds can move across borders and through mixers within minutes, and ZachXBT’s argument is that the jurisdictions on this list consistently fail on that specific dimension, regardless of how developed or resource-rich they otherwise are.
What This Means For Victims In These Countries
I think the practical impact of this announcement deserves real attention, because it isn’t just commentary, it’s a policy change with direct consequences. ZachXBT has functioned for years as one of the few independent routes victims have toward actually recovering stolen funds when official channels stall out. A formal, automated rejection policy based on jurisdiction means victims in some of the world’s most fraud-affected regions, Nigeria and India both carry significant crypto adoption and correspondingly significant fraud exposure, will now have one fewer avenue for help, specifically because of how their own country’s institutions have historically handled these cases, not because of anything the victims themselves did.
I think that’s a genuinely uncomfortable outcome regardless of how justified the underlying frustration is. Victims don’t choose their country’s law enforcement competence, and being turned away because of a government’s track record adds a second layer of harm on top of the original theft.
The Broader Debate This Ranking Reopens
Stepping back, I don’t think this is really a story about which specific countries deserve criticism, it’s a story about the limits of relying on a single independent investigator to fill a gap that institutional law enforcement should be closing. ZachXBT has built a reputation specifically by taking on cases that formal systems couldn’t or wouldn’t resolve, and this announcement is essentially him acknowledging that his own capacity has limits, and that some jurisdictions have consistently made his work harder rather than easier regardless of how strong the underlying evidence was.
Whether you read this ranking as a fair, evidence-backed critique of specific institutional failures or as an overly broad judgment that risks painting entire countries with one brush, the underlying problem it points to is real and worth taking seriously: crypto fraud victims worldwide are still depending heavily on individual investigators working largely unpaid, precisely because the formal systems meant to handle these cases keep failing to move at the speed the crime itself demands.
Disclosure: This is not trading or investment advice. Always do your research before buying any cryptocurrency or investing in any services. Follow us on X @nulltxnews
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