The Ministry of Justice is trying to recover more than $ 225.3 million in cryptocurrency stolen from the Americans in trusted plans and Romanesque scams short of Vietnam and the Philippines.
A civil confiscation complaint was laid In the American district district court this week, where FBI investigators and American secret services said they used a blockchain analysis to trace funds with fraud systems perpetrated by actors in the Philippines.
People behind the scams used hundreds of cryptographic portfolios to execute thousands of transactions in order to hide the source of the funds. Investigators traced money to more than 430 suspected victims in Texas, Arizona, Virginia, Iowa, California and other regions.
The police were initially contacted by Cryptocurrency Exchange OKX two years ago on a large number of accounts that the company thought it was involved in the operations of the scam.
The police interviewed around 60 victims who had lost about $ 19 million, but the incidents led them to dozens of other connected blockchain addresses where the victims deposited millions of virtual currencies under the false belief that they used legitimate platforms.
“These scams attack confidence, often leading to extreme financial difficulties for the victims,” said Shawn Bradstreet special agent of American secret services. “This seizure of $ 225.3 million in funds related to cryptocurrency investment scams marks the greatest cryptocurrency crisis in the history of American secret services.”
Many victims referenced in the complaint share similar stories. They were generally contacted by young women or men on social media sites and proposed to invest their money on cryptocurrency platforms. Some people sent millions of dollars before asking to recover their money, to tell them that they had to pay additional costs or taxes to withdraw the money.
After depositing the final payment, the victims were excluded from their accounts.
The case is proof of the growing American capacity of the application of cryptocurrency tracing laws and to return part of the lost funds to the victims.
Vietnamese in the Philippines
Prosecutors said in the complaint that many accounts used to whiten funds had been recorded with Vietnamese nationals and that several of the IP addresses were traced in the Philippines.
US officials worked with OKX and Blockchain Company Tether to follow funds and accounts. Almost all 144 OKX accounts led by companies were accessible via IP addresses in the Philippines and all were associated with email addresses using the same names.
The accounts were opened using Vietnamese identification documents and photos that seemed to have all been taken in the same place.
“This is an indicator that accounts are controlled by people working in a” scam composed “or a location operating for the sole purpose of perpetrating cryptocurrency confidence scams and money laundering,” said prosecutors.
In two of the photos submitted to check the OKX accounts, the illustrated people brought lanyards with the name of the company “itchno specialist inc.” The company is a call center located in Manila and the law enforcement organizations have found several job offers looking for Mandarine language candidates. The announcements offered to pay so that people go to the Philippines for the posts.
The Ministry of Justice said that the use of Vietnamese documents for the 144 OKX accounts accessible via the Filipino IP addresses is “in accordance with the foreign workforce used in the compounds of the cryptocurrency confidence scam”.
They found other evidence linking all the accounts to the same operation, noting that the same IP address has accessed 132 of the 144 accounts identified on OKX.
In addition to the American victims, investigators found other people in the United Kingdom, Australia and Germany. One of the most eminent victims was Shan Hanes, the former CEO of the late Kansas Bank Heartland Tri-State. Hanes was sentenced At 24 years in prison last year for having stolen money from the bank to invest in cryptocurrency regimes.
In the complaint, the prosecutors said Hanes stole more than $ 50 million to the bank before he finally went to send certain funds to the cryptocurrency trusted program.
The complaint also noted at least two cases where lawyers contacted the Ministry of Justice in tacit attempts to combat the crisis effort, which were finally abandoned. One of the lawyers worked on behalf of a well -known Chinese company accused by officials in the Philippines of “kidnapping and human trafficking”.
Cryptocurrencies’ investment fraud continues to be one of the most expensive crimes reported to the FBI. The FBI said that more than $ 5.8 billion was lost last year in cryptographic investment plans.
“Investment systems in cryptocurrency can have devastating and sustainable consequences for the victims, far beyond financial losses,” said the FBI special agent Sanjay Virmani. “In this case, hundreds of victims have lost millions of dollars for a program developed.”
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