A London investor lost a fortune in crypto. Police and KuCoin left him stranded.
Bureaucracy, slow policing and a lack of cooperation from exchanges are giving hackers the upper hand.
In August 2023, James Murray thought he’d struck gold. The London-based AI consultant had been investing in crypto for a while, and a bet on a Solana-based token had just delivered a handsome return.
And then it was stolen.
Busy moving house, he didn’t check his wallet every day. When he finally did, he discovered the entire balance gone and that the funds had been moved through several wallets before landing on a centralised exchange.
That gave him hope. If the funds had reached a large, regulated platform, perhaps they could be frozen and recovered. He first contacted the exchange itself and then the UK’s Action Fraud, the branch of the police that deal with scams, fraud and digital crime.
What followed was a familiar nightmare for victims of hacks and scams worldwide. Police struggled to handle a technically complex, cross-border case. The exchange was slow to cooperate. And the thieves cashed out long before anyone could catch up with them.
Murray is hardly alone. Every year, millions fall victim to crime involving crypto, made more frustrating by the fact funds can be seen moving on-chain but accessing or stopping them without assistance is impossible. In 2024, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center received more than 859,000 complaints of suspected internet crime, with losses topping $16 billion — up 33% from the previous year.
“[Law enforcement were] clearly not equipped or mandated to act on something this technical or cross-jurisdictional. You quickly realise you’re on your own,” Murray told Scamurai.
For nearly two years, Murray has battled both UK authorities and KuCoin, the exchange that received his funds, to try and get some recourse, starting from waiting over a month for a response from Action Fraud to the case being assigned to a London Metropolitan Police officer with no experience in crypto cases. The officer then spent months wrangling with KuCoin’s legal team for assistance.
“I’ve lost a lot of trust in both KuCoin and the Met,” Murray said. “KuCoin has been passive at best. No urgency, no accountability — just hiding behind process.”
His experience highlights a growing gap between the scale of crypto crime and the ability of law enforcement and exchanges to respond. “Time is your enemy, and bureaucracy works in the hacker’s favour. They know that," he said.
Today, his stolen funds would be worth over $1 million.
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// A global giant
KuCoin’s own website can’t decide its origin story. One page claims founders Eric Tang and Michael Gan began writing the code for KuCoin in 2013 after struggling with Mt. Gox, aiming to build a “People’s Exchange”. Another says KuCoin was officially founded in 2017.
The exchange has grown into one of the world’s most popular crypto platforms, valued at $10 billion in 2022 and boasting more than 40 million registered users globally.
Despite its origins in China, documents from the DOJ described KuCoin as formed by three entities, one each in Singapore, the Seychelles and the Cayman Islands.
When Murray and the police officer assigned to his case contacted KuCoin in early 2024 they hit a wall of bureaucracy. Emails reviewed by Scamurai show substantial back and forth emails about correct procedure rather than the actual case, and slow responses from the exchange.
KuCoin said it was “pleased to cooperate voluntarily”, while pointedly making clear it was under no obligation to do so. Its legal team never signed their emails with names.
The exchange declined to accept a request made using the police’s usual request system and instead insisted that law enforcement requests be submitted through its own portal. When the officer tried to comply, technical problems with logging in arose, further delaying the investigation. It took weeks just to verify the officer’s account on KuCoin’s portal.
The emails read as two sides working from very different playbooks. At one point, KuCoin demanded the officer upload a copy of their warrant card, a type of police ID issued in the UK. A former Met officer described the request to Scamurai as absurd and potentially career-ending if granted. The officer flatly refused, citing obvious risks of fraud.
Eventually, in July 2024, KuCoin agreed to accept a request submission by email and confirmed it had frozen the suspect account. For Murray, that brief moment of relief quickly soured.
Following the supposed freeze, the exchange’s legal team stopped replying. It did not respond to a request from Scamurai to comment for this piece.
// KuCoin’s legal troubles
While dealing with and then ignoring Murray’s case, KuCoin faced its own reckoning. In January 2025, the company pleaded guilty in the U.S. to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business. It agreed to pay $297 million in fines and forfeitures and was barred from operating in the U.S. for two years.
Prosecutors said KuCoin facilitated billions in suspicious transactions, including criminal proceeds from darknet markets, cybercrime and fraud, while failing to implement effective anti–money laundering and customer-verification programs.
Its founders stepped down. The company’s chief legal officer, BC Wong — the same figure overseeing the obstructive responses to Murray’s case — became CEO.
Wong has since sought to reposition KuCoin as a compliant exchange, including applying for an EU MiCA license for its regional subsidiary. But Murray’s ordeal suggests little has changed in practice.
Unable to make any progress, police ultimately closed Murray’s case. His appeals to reopen it went unanswered for nearly a year. When he finally received an update in June 2025, he learned from a new Met officer that the funds were long gone by the time KuCoin claimed to have frozen the account. The officer also disclosed that the account was linked to a Russian email provider. The trail then led from KuCoin to HTX, another exchange.
Though the case has been reopened, the Met’s specialist cryptocurrency unit has refused to take it on.
Despite Murray’s correspondence with Met police officers and their involvement in the case, the Met told Scamurai it could not comment on the case as it was originally filed with Action Fraud. Action Fraud did not respond to a request for comment.
Murray doubts he’ll ever recover the money. “Unless someone slips up or confesses, it’s probably gone,” he said.
He frames the loss as the cost of his initial investment, not the million-dollar fortune it might have become. “My advice to others,” he concluded, “is treat it like a financial death.”
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