Millions of cryptocurrency investors have been scammed out of massive sums of real money. In 2018, losses from cryptocurrency-related crimes amounted to US$1.7 billion. The criminals use both old-fashioned and new-technology tactics to swindle their marks in schemes based on digital currencies exchanged through online databases called blockchains. From researching blockchain, cryptocurrency and cybercrime, I can see that some cryptocurrency fraudsters rely on tried-and-true Ponzi schemes that use income from new participants to pay out returns to earlier investors. Professional money recovery? Apparently, there are services you can hire that specialize in this. Some of them seem to imply they don't charge unless they are successful. You might want to spend some time browsing Google search results such as these. I know nothing about these. Obviously, be very careful since some of these may be tricky (but legitimate) or even fully fraudulent. Some of these may be cynically built on the theory that someone who has fallen for a scam should be easy to scam a second time. But if you can find a service that looks good like prudentrecovery and you figure out some way to validate it as a trustworthy (maybe get someone to help you with that), it might be worth trying out. In my opinion prudent (prudentrecovery.com) these services are, theoretically, not necessarily fraudulent. (How's that for a recommendation?