In a statement on April 3, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) reported that it had confiscated digital assets linked to cryptocurrency investment fraud totaling $112 million.
Assistant Attorney General Kenneth A. Polite, Jr. said that “These particularly vicious frauds – where scammers carefully cultivate relationships with their victims over time – have devastated families and cost individuals their life savings. Now that we have seized this virtual currency, we will seek to swiftly return it to victims.”
Using social media, dating websites, phone conversations, texts, and other forms of communication, scammers in the relevant cases steadily gained the trust of their victims.
The criminals ultimately persuaded their victims to invest in phony cryptocurrency platforms before sending the money they had stolen to their own addresses.
According to the DOJ, this particular scam is known as “Sha Zhu Pan,” which is Chinese for “pig butchering.” The majority of the victims were in the 30 to 49 age range.
The DOJ claimed that between 2021 and 2022, cryptocurrency fraud, including pig slaughtering schemes, climbed 183%, resulting in $2.57 billion in stolen money. The majority of the $3.31 billion in fraud reported to the FBI’s Internet Crimes Complaint Center (IC3) was a result of this.
Also, the agency announced the seizure of 50,000 BTC ($3.36 billion) connected to the Silk Road in November 2022. In February 2023, the FBI seized $100k in NFTs.
