ChainWitnessBot
ChainWitnessBot is the web crawler operated by ChainWitness. It visits a short, hand-curated list of public sources — government alerts, sanctions notices, threat-intelligence publications, and the public paste sites and code-sharing gists where scammers post wallets — looking for cryptocurrency addresses that appear in them, and preserves a dated copy of each page where one is found. It reads only public pages; it does not touch closed forums, private groups or any site behind a login.
How to recognize it
User-Agent: ChainWitnessBot/1.0 (+https://chainwitness.net/bot)What it does
- Visits only sources added manually by our operator; it does not discover or follow links across the open web. On listing pages it follows links to articles on the same site, one level deep.
- Reads public pages only. It never logs in, submits forms, solves challenges or bypasses access controls.
- Honors
robots.txt. The only exception is a site whose owner authorized us in writing, or whose terms of use expressly allow automated collection; each exception is recorded with its basis, and every capture made under one says so in its manifest. If access is blocked or challenged, it stops and records the block; it does not retry around it. - Makes at most one request every 10 seconds per site, and revisits each source on a daily to monthly schedule.
- Saves a screenshot, the page text and a WARC archive of the pages it captures, with SHA-256 hashes, so each finding can be traced back to its source and date.
- On paste sites, keeps only what it needs: it never stores a seed phrase or private key (these are removed before anything is saved), masks third-party contact details near an address, and discards credential dumps (such as stealer logs) entirely. A paste that merely mentions an address for a neutral reason, like a donation, is not published.
What ChainWitness does with it
ChainWitness records that an address was published at a given URL on a given date, and keeps proof of it. It does not assert that the content is true, and it does not link addresses to people.
Opting out
To stop ChainWitnessBot from visiting your site, add this to your robots.txt:
User-agent: ChainWitnessBot
Disallow: /Changes are picked up within 24 hours. A rule that names ChainWitnessBot is always honored, even where we had permission to collect. You can also write to us and we will remove your site from our source list.
Contact
Questions, problems or removal requests: use the contact form.