Changelly’s Frozen Account Was a Scam Red Flag, Not Overreach

Published by James Harris on June 19, 2026June 19, 2026

Aman Kesar, an X user who had been publicly pressuring Changelly for months over what he claimed was an unjust seizure of 5.73 BTC, appears to have inadvertently invited scrutiny onto himself by reaching out to on-chain investigator ZachXBT for help. Instead of finding an advocate, he found someone who started pulling threads.

ZachXBT’s investigation surfaced what he described as irregular outflows from multiple platforms, including Bitcoin Depot, Athena Bitcoin, Coinhub ATM, Cash App, Robinhood, Coinbase, and Strike, all flowing to a single individual in New Delhi. The pattern is consistent with how crypto ATM and peer-to-peer scams typically operate: funds are aggregated from dispersed victims across retail-facing platforms before being consolidated and moved toward conversion. Changelly’s AML hold on the swap, which Kesar had framed as institutional bad faith, now reads more plausibly as a compliance flag that worked as intended. The irony is that Kesar’s months-long public campaign against Changelly, including posts on December 31 and March of this year, and his eventual appeal to ZachXBT, generated far more forensic attention than a quietly frozen account ever would have.

Kesar’s account and all associated posts have since been deleted, which tends to happen when a complaint strategy backfires rather than when one is vindicated.

The broader context here is that ZachXBT’s track record gives his preliminary findings weight even before formal verification. His involvement has preceded law enforcement action in multiple prior cases, and the Indian enforcement environment is not passive: the country’s Enforcement Directorate arrested hacker Srikrishna in May over a 2017 Bitcoin theft, and the Himachal Pradesh High Court recently denied bail to a promoter in a crypto MLM scheme that allegedly defrauded over 80,000 investors. Changelly has not publicly commented on the case, and ZachXBT has not yet detailed the specific nature of the suspected scam or how the funds were originally obtained, so the full picture remains incomplete. What is clear is that the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report logged over $11 billion in cryptocurrency losses from more than 181,000 complaints, a 21 percent increase year-over-year, and cases like this one illustrate exactly how that number compounds.

ZachXBT indicated on June 19 that further details are expected, though no specific timeline for additional disclosures has been confirmed.