150K crypto coins all gone, any hopes?

Hey everyone,

I’m devastated. My friend and I had been holding crypto together for five years, started with 4K in 2020 and building up to nearly $150k. The funds were in my friend’s wallet, he’s the tech-savviest guy I know, always careful. I’d been begging him to move the funds to an offline wallet, but we all got lazy.

Today, he fell for a phishing email. It looked like it came from Coinbase. Everything seemed legit, an email saying its an upgrade to a smarter wallet from coinbase, even the link took him to what appeared to be the real site. But instead of a secure transfer to a smarter wallet, it was transferred to someone’s wallet, all our funds went straight into a scammer’s wallet. He is beating himself up saying he wants to pay back everything, but we’re poor folks and I have entered this whole thing as an investment with the possibility of loss, I just didn’t think the end would be this way.

I’m at a loss. Is there anything we can do to track the scammer or recover the funds? Has anyone had success in a situation like this, or is it just time to accept the loss and try to move on?

Any advice or insights would mean the world, even emotional ones. Thank you 🙏🏼

EDIT #1 The internet is not so kind, yeesh. I haven’t put you in context enough to tell you my friend is a lifetime friend and gladly family, we both got into crypto during COVID and decided to invest, it’s been five years. He isn’t taking it lightly on himself, and doing all measures to pay me back and fund me back which I refused to do because it’s absurd. I am not here to question a lifetime friendship, I am very certain and sure of my situation. I am merely here to ask for gentle advice from people for any sliver of hope, that’s all I asked. Thank you for those who actually provided this while being so kind. I learned my lessons and not looking for someone to parent me or tell me how naive we might be, it’s an investment chance we tried, we failed, and I guess I just have to accept it.

EDIT #2: I get why this story might seem fake, and I understand why some might think my friend stole the funds. Unfortunately, fraud does happen!! but this isn’t one of those cases. I know my friend well, and everything else checks out. He genuinely made a stupid mistake. While it’s hard to convey every detail of the context here, this is just an incredibly unfortunate situation! and it hurts to fall into these.

We’ve been sitting on this investment for 5 years for fun, and yes, we got lazy about it despite pushing for an offline wallet. It’s not that we didn’t know better! we just slipped. but life got so busy, and this was a side venture for us, so we let our guard down.

I know it’s easy to think, “That could never happen to me” but scams are designed to catch you in that one unguarded moment that my friend fell for. Every advice given is something I would say to everyone and people around me, sometimes it shocks me as well when I hear these stories like “How tf did this guy do this, it’s stupid” I get the skepticism and when people say its fake because I, too, didn’t realize how common these stories are on reddit.

To those who reached out with kind words and advice, thank you. It’s comforting to know that empathetic people are still out there.

As for the negativity and harsh judgments, I’m letting all that go. There’s no point in holding onto more heaviness when the situation itself is already so heavy.

Thank you again to those who showed compassion. It means more than you know.