In brief
- U.S. prosecutors have seized more than $25 million in cryptocurrency linked to international fraud schemes that targeted victims across the U.S. and Canada.
- The money was recovered through five civil forfeiture complaints filed Tuesday in Washington, D.C., tied to investment and romance scams.
- It adds to the more than $800 million recovered by the Scam Center Strike Force, launched in late 2025.
U.S. prosecutors have seized more than $25 million in cryptocurrency tied to international scams that defrauded thousands of victims across the United States and Canada, the Justice Department said Tuesday.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, working with the Secret Service’s Washington Field Office, filed five civil forfeiture complaints on Tuesday, each tied to a separate investigation into fraudulent crypto investment platforms and online romance schemes. Agents said they traced illicit proceeds through hundreds of intermediary wallet addresses, where they had been commingled with funds from other victims.
The largest complaint seeks some $12.1 million tied to romance scams that hit more than 200 people, followed by about $10.4 million flagged by Canadian authorities across more than 270 suspected victim transactions. The three remaining cases range from $285,000 to $2.4 million, including one in which scammers posed as recovery agents offering to retrieve funds stolen in an earlier fraud.
In each case, the launderers were mostly based in Southeast Asia, with IP addresses in China, Malaysia, and Cambodia, prosecutors said.
The Scam Center Strike Force
The seizure stems from the Scam Center Strike Force, launched in November 2025 by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro. Investigators “cut through complex laundering schemes” to reach the money, Pirro said in a statement. The five investigations remain open, with the recovered funds bringing the strike force’s total haul past $800 million.
In each case, prosecutors said, the launderers were mostly based in Southeast Asia, with IP addresses in China, Malaysia, and Cambodia—part of a scam economy increasingly run from the region and flagged by Interpol as a global threat.
Much crypto investment and romance fraud is operated out of forced-labor compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, where trafficked workers are coerced into defrauding victims worldwide. In October, U.S. and UK authorities charged Cambodia’s Prince Group and seized more than 127,000 BTC from the network—then worth about $12 billion, marking the largest civil seizure and forfeiture in the DOJ’s history.
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