This is general -- sort of.

Let's start with what I've pointed out before: All cryptocurrency transactions are traceable; there is no such thing as an "anonymous" transaction and what's worse is that they're retrospectively traceable to a specific wallet forevermore into the future no matter what transfers occurred before or since because blockchain signatures must be immutable or the entire scheme can be counterfeited at any time.

This is exactly opposite how they're marketed and sold to people and the people doing the selling know they're lying which is why I won't have anything to do with them.  They are all scams as they're ALL manufacturing alleged "use cases" that are knowing lies and thus the people doing it are and intend to **** you in the starfish with a cactus.

Thus if you think you can transfer "money" around using these technologies for some illicit purpose (e.g. drug dealing, etc.) and because the only identifier is a string of characters, thus you can't be traced, you're wrong and if the authorities (wherever) get sufficiently interested, or for that matter a private party does then any mistake you make or ever did make with that specific wallet or any you or anyone else transacted to or with it will unravel your so-called "privacy" and you can be hunted down.  While it is possible to never make such a mistake humans **** up all the time and all of us **** up at least once in a while thus the indelibility of such records and the fact that they're mathematically provable to be correct means they're also admissible evidence in court.

Thus the only defense you'll have is the Statute of Limitations -- and for some acts and circumstances there isn't one other than death -- yours, to be specific.

The problem with tracing such by private parties is that its kind of expensive.  Its not hard, but its expensive and typically requires access to things a private party cannot acquire by legal means.  But all these things are trivially acquirable through lawful process by governments and law enforcement.  I assure you that if a communications provider is subpoenaed you're ****ed.  I've never met any businessperson willing to go to prison for someone else's criminal act so there you are and there you go.

The more-practical problem is that any time someone wants you to communicate with them for such a purpose on a system like Telegram they're scamming you.  "X" (Twitter) and similar are full of these people as are all other so-called "social media."  Any such solicitation, once again, is a scam and if you get involved in it you're going to get robbed.  Further since the number of times this is not true can be counted on the fingers of one hand across the entire user base of major social media the providers of same, all of whom are using "machine learning", should instantly ban any account attempting such a solicitation since the odds of such being legitimate are statistically zero and yet they do not.  But once again all this is traceable and thus if the authorities give a **** they can subpoena said "social media" site and you'd be shocked at how easily and completely the source can be identified because, once again, people **** up.  Even if they're "using" a VPN or similar it doesn't matter although I'd argue that in most cases VPNs exit points (and yeah, traffic analysis makes it easy to know you're on a public one) should be blackballed from social media sites because such a user is by definition attempting to obfuscate who they are and the point of "social media" as sold to the users is that you, as a user, are an individual thus said providers are deliberately suborning fraud by permitting the use of same.  At minimum, if some site claims this is permitted "because Joe Evil Government wants to silence certain opinions" all such messages should carry an automatically-applied flag that is trivially visible to all and identifies the source as untrustworthy as to identity, intent and uniqueness.  Nonetheless this is a small problem within the realm of tracing people.

Third, so-called "encrypted" message platforms like Telegram are almost all not actually secure and thus the authorities can break and trace that too -- and its not hard to do so.  Telegram in particular is trivially broken because it is not actual end-to-end encryption.  I've written on this before: That system is not secure, it never has been secure, it has been routinely abused in being sold as "secure" when it isn't and if you rely on it to do an illegal thing you may well be buying yourself a nice stay in the Graybar motel!

However, there is a more-practical problem for people who get scammed: The scammer is probably not in the United States.  If they are (or travel here at some point) then finding them is sufficient to throw on a pair of cuffs and toss 'em before a judge, but most of the people doing this **** are in places like Romania, Ukraine, India, Belarus, Russia, China and similar.  I've been tracking attempted break-ins on my equipment for more than 20 years and while the exact order of nations of origin shifts a bit with the wind and  political season, mostly in whatever nation is doing it today, basically none of it originates in the United States.  This is a problem if someone succeeds in scamming you because you can't "claw it back" thus you have to find and confiscate the asset(s) at the destination.  If that is effectively impossible because the person who did it is in Belarus, India or China you're ****ed unless you can get the government interested enough to go chase it on your behalf which, in the case of nations where their government doesn't give a flying **** about American anything in any form, inherently involves at least the threat of military force.

Needless to say ordinary peons will not succeed at this.  Hell, even fairly-large corporate entities almost-never succeed at it when the theft is out in the open.  May I remind you that a long time ago Fellowes (the paper-shredder people) had their patented technology simply robbed and copied by China and not a damn thing was done by the United States -- they were entirely unable to find any redress.  If you think as an ordinary person you'll do better you need your lithium dose adjusted so unless you can get the FBI or some other law enforcement agency interested again, if the scammer is outside the United States you're probably ****ed.

I've occasionally been asked if there's something I could do to help in such cases.  Reality is that 99.9% of the time while the odds are fairly good I can trace at least the location of who did it (at significant cost in time) statistically-speaking the odds of it being a US person in the United States are zero and there is no way to "reverse" such a transaction; you have to take it back via a second transaction which means forcing the other party to either disgorge it or breaking their seed key and stealing it back -- and the latter, unless you are a government, is wildly illegal and other than by physical confiscation of a device if the asset is outside of an exchange you can compel to cough it up is somewhere between extremely difficult and, if it was generated properly, essentially impossible by brute force means so the best option in that case is to literally kidnap the person, strap them to a chair and pull off their fingernails with vice-grips if they refuse to divulge it.

I wish the news was better and that there was some way to help people who get ****ed in this regard beyond trying to get the government's law enforcement folks interested (ha!) but it isn't and none of the social media sites do a ******n thing to put a cork in this **** at the source.  All of them could, even though it would not be 100% successful, but none of them do and none of them ever have.  I could write a tome on effective countermeasures and have discussed them in my columns in the past but nobody cares and since these providers, in the US at least, all have managed to evade any sort of derivative liability from a legal point of view all that remains is their own ethics in the matter, of which all of them have none.