US law enforcement has seized over $225 million in cryptocurrency allegedly stolen from dozens of American victims as part of a sophisticated investment scam, the Justice Department said Wednesday.
It’s the largest-ever seizure of funds stolen in so-called “crypto confidence” scams, which dupe people into investing in fraudulent cryptocurrency schemes, the department said.
The scam affected more than 400 people worldwide, including dozens of Americans, and caused millions of dollars in losses, according to a complaint unsealed Wednesday. The scammers conducted “hundreds of thousands” of transactions in an effort to launder the stolen cryptocurrency, according to the Justice Department.
The US government now has possession of the stolen crypto and will be working to return as much of it as possible to victims, Shawn Bradstreet, a special agent in charge at the Secret Service, said at a news conference on Wednesday.
Losses from crypto investment scams have surged in recent years. Victims reported nearly $4 billion in crypto-related investment losses in 2023 compared to $2.57 billion in 2022, according to the FBI. That number increased to $5.8 billion in 2024.
The FBI and Secret Service are trying to do more to sound the alarm that the crypto-investment scams could ruin Americans’ lives and those of their loved ones. CNN reported last year on one American man in his 80s who took his own life after losing all his savings to scammers.
A large volume of crypto confidence scams— also referred to as “pig butchering” — are conducted by networks of scammers in Southeast Asia, according to US law enforcement. A CNN investigation has traced some of the schemes to large compounds along the Myanmar-Thailand border.
In this case, investigators traced at least some of the fraudulent activity to the Philippines.
“These scams prey on trust, often resulting in extreme financial hardship for the victims,” Bradstreet, the Secret Service agent, said in a statement.
For some US law enforcement officials, Wednesday’s crackdown is a welcome sign that the Trump administration will continue to pursue prolific networks of crypto scammers.
An April memo from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche accused the Biden administration of using prosecutions to effectively impose regulations on the cryptocurrency industry, raising concerns among some law enforcement agents that the new department leadership would not aggressively pursue crypto scams.
The memo also disbanded the Justice Department’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, which the Biden administration set up in 2022 to pursue criminal misuse of crypto and other digital assets.
But Jeanine Pirro, the interim US attorney for the District of Columbia, said at a news conference Wednesday that prosecutors would go after the scammers.
“This is an unregulated Wild West,” Pirro said of crypto-related crime. “But it’s not just an unregulated Wild West. It’s the Wild North, East and South.”
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