Hey all,

Let's say a friend was cyber-cucked recently, and was tricked into sending a scammer a significant amount of Bitcoin, the how is not so important, but lets say they thought it was a friend.

As much as this friend has scorned Chain Analysis companies, they would like to pursue justice or at least follow the transactions to see if it probabilistically touches any known addresses/exchanges. Traversing through a block explorer like mempool.space or walletexplorer.com resulted in turtles all the way down with presumed mixing the scammer may have conducted, so a more sophisticated crawling is necessary for any hope of tracing the txs.

Are there any fairly sophisticated Chain Analysis tools or services for Plebs? Not sure what licensing for chainalysis.com goes for but they don't list their prices, so I can't imagine it's within the realm of an individual Pleb to afford for investigation of a single incident.

Also, is it advisable to also file an official report with ic3.gov or is that basically useless with the risk of getting on the naughty list? The friend's original wallet from which the funds were sent was KYC so no downside there, it can be assumed the state already knows about those utxos, and it may be beneficial to report for future tax purposes.

Any advice appreciated.