Federal prosecutors filed five civil forfeiture complaints seeking over $25 million in crypto stolen from thousands of U.S. and Canadian victims in pig-butchering scams tied to Southeast Asian syndicates.
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Federal prosecutors filed five civil forfeiture complaints on July 21, seeking to recover more than $25 million in cryptocurrency stolen from thousands of fraud victims in the U.S. and Canada.
The complaints, lodged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the U.S. Secret Service Washington Field Office, target funds tied to the Secret Service’s Cyber Fraud Task Force. The $25 million is part of over $800 million the task force has recovered since its inception.
The cases stem from the Scam Center Strike Force, an initiative U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro launched in November 2025 to crack down on crypto investment fraud linked to Chinese transnational criminal syndicates. “This $25 million seizure is a direct result of the Scam Center Strike Force I launched in November 2025, and it demonstrates the power of aggressively targeting these international fraud networks,” Pirro said in a statement.
Two complaints account for the bulk of the recovered funds. In one, a private-sector partner flagged suspicious transactions to the Cyber Fraud Task Force. Investigators found more than 200 people had been defrauded through online romance schemes. The complaint seeks roughly $12.09 million.
In a second case, Canadian authorities alerted Secret Service agents in late 2024 to a set of wallet addresses. Agents froze those wallets and traced over 270 suspected victim transactions tied to fake investment platforms. That complaint seeks about $10.4 million.
The remaining three complaints cover the rest of the $25 million haul. Across all five cases, the people moving the money were traced to Southeast Asia.
The scams follow a “pig butchering” pattern: a scammer builds trust with a target over time, persuades them to buy real cryptocurrency, then shifts the funds into counterfeit trading platforms. Many of the operations run from guarded compounds in Burma, Cambodia, and Laos, where workers are often trafficked, the Justice Department said in earlier announcements.
Enforcement has accelerated through 2026. The Strike Force had seized $580 million by February, rising to over $700 million by April. Prosecutors have charged two Chinese nationals who ran a compound in Burma. The Treasury Department sanctioned a Cambodian senator, Kok An, in April.
U.S. officials estimate scam operations in Southeast Asia take up to $10 billion a year from Americans. The FBI reported Americans lost roughly $21 billion to cyber-enabled crimes and online scams in 2025.
Prosecutors aim to pursue forfeiture in court and return recovered funds where possible.
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