Funds and claims
If you had a balance on TradeOgre when it stopped responding, the question is not how to log back in — it is whether there is any route by which those assets come back, and what you would need in hand if one opens. This page sets out what is known about where the funds went, the mechanism through which a claim could theoretically be made, the records worth gathering while you still can, and the second wave of scams that follows every collapse of this kind.
They are in the custody of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. On 18 September 2025 the RCMP announced it had dismantled TradeOgre and seized more than CAD $56 million in cryptoassets — roughly US$40 million — after an investigation that opened in June 2024 following a tip from Europol. The seizure was carried out by taking control of TradeOgre infrastructure located in Quebec.
Two consequences follow, and it is worth being precise about both.
The first is that the assets have not vanished and were not stolen by the operators. Unlike an exit scam, where funds are laundered and dispersed within hours, seized assets are held and accounted for by a state agency. That is a materially better starting position than most collapse scenarios offer.
The second is that no private party can move them. Not the former operators, not a lawyer, not a recovery service, not anyone who messages you. The keys are controlled by a police force, and the only thing that changes their status is a decision by a court or by the agency itself.
The RCMP has said that customers who are not implicated in criminal activity may have recourse through the Canadian court system if the force decides to pursue forfeiture of the seized cryptocurrency. That sentence contains the whole shape of the process, and each part of it matters.
Forfeiture is the legal step by which the state asks a court to declare seized property to be proceeds of crime and to transfer ownership permanently. It is not automatic — an agency can hold seized assets while an investigation continues without immediately commencing forfeiture proceedings. Where such proceedings are commenced, they typically create a defined route for third parties to assert an interest in specific property, which is the door through which a legitimate user's claim would go.
That claim would require evidence on two points: that the specific assets are yours, and that they came from a lawful source. Both are harder here than in an ordinary case. TradeOgre operated omnibus custody, meaning user funds were pooled rather than held in individually attributable wallets, and it collected no identity documents at all. Reconstructing an individual's entitlement from that starting point is an evidentiary exercise, not an administrative one.
As of this update, no customer claims process has been publicly announced, and no forfeiture ruling has been reported. Anyone telling you a claims window is open should be asked to point to the court file.
A realistic assessment is more useful than either despair or false hope, so here is ours.
In favour: the assets exist and are held by an accountable state agency; Canadian law does contain routes for innocent third parties to assert interests in seized property; and a subset of TradeOgre users can document their deposits precisely, because blockchains do not forget.
Against: the evidentiary burden falls on claimants and is substantial; omnibus custody makes attributing specific assets to specific users genuinely difficult; the RCMP has stated it believes the majority of funds moving through the platform came from criminal sources, which shapes the posture of any proceeding; proceedings of this kind take years; and legal costs can easily exceed the value of a small balance.
Commentators following the case have made the same point in blunter terms — that a route exists in principle but is likely to be long and difficult, with many opportunities to make a procedural mistake.
The practical implication is proportionality. If your balance was worth a few hundred dollars, the sensible response is to document it, file it, and move on with your life. If it was worth a substantial amount, the cost of an initial consultation with a Canadian lawyer who handles proceeds-of-crime matters is small relative to what is at stake, and is the correct next step.
If a claims window ever opens, it will run on documentation and it will not wait for you. Everything below is worth doing whether or not a process is ever announced, because the same records serve tax reporting and any civil action.
Write down each asset and quantity you believe was in the account, and the date you last saw it. Screenshots of the balance page are the strongest thing most users have. If you have any exported trade history or API responses saved from a bot, keep them — they are timestamped records generated by the platform itself.
This is the most important evidence you can produce, because it is verifiable independently of anything the exchange said. Every deposit you made exists on a public blockchain: the sending wallet, the receiving address, the amount and the time. Pull the transaction IDs from the wallet or exchange you sent from and record them in a single document.
A third-party claim in a proceeds-of-crime proceeding generally requires demonstrating both that the assets are yours and that they came from a lawful source. Mining pool payout statements, purchase receipts from a regulated exchange, bank statements showing the fiat that funded the purchase, or an employment record if you were paid in crypto — that is the category of document that matters.
The registration email address, any confirmation emails the platform sent, password manager entries with creation dates, and your authenticator entry all help connect a person to an account that never required identification. Do not delete them. Export the emails to a file rather than leaving them in a webmail account you might lose access to.
If you submitted withdrawals in 2025 that never executed, document them: the asset, the amount, the destination address and the approximate date. These have no on-chain trace, so your own record is the only evidence of intent to remove the funds before the seizure — which may matter.
Put everything in one folder, keep a copy offline, and note the date you compiled it. Contemporaneous records assembled soon after an event carry more weight than a reconstruction produced years later, and you will not remember the details as well as you think.
Recovery fraud is the predictable second act of every exchange collapse, and this one is unusually exposed because the user base was anonymous and there is no official channel to contradict a lie.
A number of users lost their accounts before September 2025 — a lost authenticator, an abandoned email address, a password nobody wrote down. On a normal exchange that is a support problem with a known resolution path. On TradeOgre it was usually terminal, because the platform held no identity documents against which to verify you.
Your position now is not materially worse than that of users who retained access, because nobody has account access any more. What matters is the same evidence: on-chain deposits from wallets you can prove control of, source-of-funds documentation, and any record connecting you to the registered email address.
If you can still access that mailbox, export everything from it now — registration confirmations, withdrawal notifications, security alerts. If you cannot, note when and how you lost access, since that is part of the narrative any claim would need to explain.
Losses on a seized exchange have tax consequences in most jurisdictions, and they are jurisdiction-specific enough that general advice is close to useless. What is universally true is that the treatment depends on documentation you either have or do not, and that the records described above are the same ones a tax adviser will ask for.
Two points are worth flagging. Many tax regimes distinguish between a loss that is realised and one that is merely probable, and an asset held by police pending an undecided forfeiture may not be treated as realised. And a claim that later succeeds could reverse an earlier deduction. This is precisely the kind of situation where a short conversation with an accountant who understands crypto is worth more than a long search through forum posts.
Compile the evidence file described above while the sources are still reachable. Email accounts get closed, exchanges purge old withdrawal histories, and phones get replaced.
Change any password you reused from the TradeOgre account, starting with the email address it was registered to, and put two-factor authentication on that mailbox. The account is dead; the credentials are not.
Set up a way to hear about genuine developments that does not involve strangers contacting you. Court filings and agency notices are public. If someone claims a claims process has opened, verify it against those sources before acting on anything.
And if the balance was significant, get one hour of advice from a Canadian lawyer with relevant experience. Not a recovery service — a regulated lawyer you find and contact yourself, whose licence you can verify with the provincial bar.
Possibly, but no process is open yet. The RCMP has indicated that customers not implicated in criminal activity may have recourse through the Canadian courts if it pursues formal forfeiture of the seized cryptocurrency. Until such proceedings are commenced and publicised, there is nothing to file. Prepare your evidence in the meantime.
There is no direct recovery — the assets are held by the RCMP and no private party can release them. The realistic path is documenting your holdings and deposits now, monitoring official court and agency announcements, and taking legal advice if the amount justifies it.
No. Any site presenting itself as a claims portal, a recovery form or a new TradeOgre login is fraudulent. Legitimate notices in a case like this are published by a court or a police agency, not on a newly registered domain.
No. Advance-fee recovery fraud follows every major exchange collapse. Nobody outside the legal process can access seized assets, so anyone charging to do so is selling something they cannot deliver. Never pay an upfront fee, share a seed phrase, or grant remote access.
Records proving both ownership and lawful source: deposit transaction IDs on-chain, screenshots of balances, exported trade history, mining payout statements or purchase receipts, bank records behind those purchases, and anything linking you to the registration email.
Asset forfeiture proceedings routinely run for years, and this investigation was still ongoing at the time of the announcement with no charges laid. Anyone quoting a specific timeline is guessing or lying.