Federal agents seized $9 million worth of cryptocurrency linked to a cyber scam organization that has exploited more than 70 victims, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of California said Tuesday.
Before the seizure, the Justice Department and the U.S. Secret Service’s field office in San Francisco traced the Tether cryptocurrency, which is pegged to the U.S. dollar, to addresses allegedly linked to a group that scammed its victims through romance and cryptocurrency confidence schemes, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
Court documents showed that members of the cyber scam organization convinced their victims to make cryptocurrency deposits by deceiving them that they were making investments with trusted firms and cryptocurrency exchanges. The victims then found out late that these so-called firms and cryptocurrency exchanges are non-existent platforms.
“These scammers prey on ordinary investors by creating websites that tell victims their investments are working to make them money. The truth is that these international criminal actors are simply stealing cryptocurrency and leaving victims with nothing,” Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole Argentieri of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division said in a statement.
Secret Service agents discovered the funds were quickly laundered through dozens of cryptocurrency addresses and exchanged for several different cryptocurrencies, which federal prosecutors note is a money laundering technique known as “chain hopping.”
“These techniques are used to ‘layer’ the proceeds of criminal activity into new cryptocurrency ecosystems, all to obfuscate the nature, source, control, and ownership of those proceeds. The seized funds were linked to numerous victim reports made via the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) Consumer Sentinel Network,” the U.S. Attorney’s Office said.
U.S. Attorney Ismail Ramsey said his office is working further with partner agencies to seize cyber criminals’ illegal proceeds.
“Silicon Valley remains one of the world’s preeminent locations for cryptocurrency firms. As such, we remain dedicated to using all tools at our disposal to bring justice to the victims of frauds and scams,” he said in a statement.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, company Tether Limited Inc. assisted in the seizure of the cryptocurrency from the cyber scam group.
8 comments
I’m sorry, but you had to be an idiot to trust in cryptocurrency anyway! We could see how many people have been losing due to these fraudsters and cryptocurrency. I was really surprised when large companies come even car makers we’re saying that they would accept cryptocurrency as payment period that only encouraged more people to trust in it. It ain’t real money unless it’s in my bank… not floating around on the internet.
It is just another stupid scam of the day in todays’ world. All of these people with money to burn gamble to get richer instead of putting their money to good use.
Most cryptos are garbage, but the idea has merit. All means of exchange are arbitrary in the fiat currency era. The money in your bank is no more than ones and zeros. New money gets created when banks loan out money they don’t even have. It’s misguided to think that the US dollar is any more concrete than crypto. The dollar just has a trillion dollar military to back it up.
The devaluing of the dollar and reckless federal spending make the better coins like Bitcoin attractive because they are finite, and the government can’t manipulate their value. There is a very real chance that we ruin the value of the dollar and crypto speculators will be laughing at us as they save the value of their capital from dollar inflation and US credit default.
We now spend more money on debt interest than we do on our military. And that is about to jump with higher interest rates. Buckle up, it’s going to be bumpy, and the people running the show are all lunatics.
I’m skeptical of crypto as well, but its development is a hedge against a mandatory government issued digital currency. If such a mandate ever occurred, we would quickly lose our freedoms.
I’m keeping mine. Some day they will be worth something.
I’m all in . Bull market is just beginning for the 2024 bitcoin halving. People just don’t understand it .
The government wants a monopoly on scamming the public
Can’t scam an honest man.
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