The Justice Department is attempting to claw back more than $225.3 million in cryptocurrency stolen from Americans in confidence schemes and romance scams run out of Vietnam and the Philippines.
A civil forfeiture complaint was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia this week, where investigators from the FBI and U.S. Secret Service said they used blockchain analysis to trace the funds back to fraud schemes perpetrated by actors in the Philippines.
The people behind the scams used hundreds of crypto wallets to execute thousands of transactions in an effort to conceal the source of the funds. Investigators traced the money back to over 430 suspected victims in Texas, Arizona, Virginia, Iowa, California and other areas.
Law enforcement was initially contacted by cryptocurrency exchange OKX two years ago about a large number of accounts the company believed were involved in scam operations.
Officers…
