The DOJ seized $25M in crypto from romance and investment scams, tracing funds through hundreds of wallets. Five investigations remain open as authorities target Southeast Asian laundering networks.
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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 complaint is linked 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 the funds had been commingled with money from other victims.
The largest complaint seeks roughly $12.1 million tied to romance scams that hit more than 200 people. Another $10.4 million was 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 seizures come 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, and the recovered funds bring the strike force's total haul past $800 million.
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. That seizure marked the largest civil forfeiture in the Justice Department's history.
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