You have been defrauded: what to do, in order

Recovery in a cross-border fraud is difficult and not impossible. What decides the outcome is almost entirely what happens in the first days, before the money moves again and before evidence disappears.

Immediately

1. Stop paying. Including any payment described as necessary to release what has already been paid. That request is itself a recognised second-stage fraud.
2. Preserve everything. Contracts, invoices, payment confirmations, emails, messaging threads, website pages as screenshots with dates, names of every individual. Export rather than screenshot where possible.
3. Contact your bank. Recall of a recent transfer is occasionally possible and the window is measured in days. Ask for the beneficiary bank's details and the payment reference for later use.
4. Write down the chronology while it is fresh — who said what, when, and what you relied on. This document becomes the basis of every complaint afterwards.

In the first weeks

• Report to the police in your own country and in the country where the provider is based. Both matter: one for your bank and insurers, one for any realistic enforcement.
• Report to the programme, if a citizenship or residence programme was invoked. Programmes act against agents who misrepresent them, and they maintain lists precisely for this.
• Report to the regulator where the provider claimed professional status — a bar association or financial regulator has powers a court process does not, and moves faster.
• Instruct a lawyer in the provider's jurisdiction. Enforcement happens where the assets are, and a claim in your own country against a foreign entity with no assets there is a document rather than a remedy.

The realistic assessment

Where the counterparty is a licensed agent with a business to protect, recovery through complaint and negotiation is genuinely possible. Where it was an unlicensed intermediary, funds moved through several jurisdictions, and the entity has no assets, the honest answer is that the money is unlikely to return and the value of the exercise is preventing the next person.

What not to do

• Do not engage recovery agents who contact you afterwards offering to retrieve funds for an advance. That is the same fraud, run against the same list.
• Do not pay a further sum to complete a process that has already failed.
• Do not stay silent out of embarrassment. The reporting is what protects the next applicant, and the shame belongs elsewhere.