U.S. Seized $580 Million From Crypto Scam Networks In Three Months

U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia Jeanine Ferris Pirro announced this week that the newly formed strike force, operational since November 2025, has frozen and seized over $580 million in cryptocurrency assets tied to transnational fraud networks.

The targets are the same organized crime operations that have quietly extracted billions from American victims for years: pig butchering syndicates operating out of compound facilities in Myanmar, Cambodia, and Laos, linked primarily to Chinese organized crime.

The scale of what was announced is difficult to contextualize without knowing what came before it. U.S. officials estimate that Americans lose nearly $10 billion annually to these Southeast Asia-based networks alone. The $580 million figure represents roughly six weeks of that estimated annual loss, recovered in court-admissible seizures over a single quarter.

What Pig Butchering Actually Involves

The term gets used frequently enough in crypto circles that its meaning sometimes gets abstracted from what it actually describes. The mechanics are worth spelling out clearly.

Victims are identified and approached on social media platforms or messaging apps, often through what appears to be a wrong number, a LinkedIn connection request, or a romantic interest. The relationship is cultivated deliberately over days or weeks, sometimes months. Trust is built. Personal details are shared. Then, at a carefully chosen moment, the subject of cryptocurrency investment is introduced, naturally, casually, as though it emerged organically from the conversation.

The victim is guided toward a fraudulent investment platform that shows fabricated returns. Early withdrawals are sometimes permitted to build confidence. Eventually, a large transfer is requested, often under the pretense of a limited opportunity or a tax requirement. Once the funds clear, the platform vanishes and the contact disappears.

The “fattening up” period, the patient cultivation before the financial ask, is what distinguishes pig butchering from simpler scams. It is operationally intensive, which is precisely why the compounds running these schemes rely on trafficked labor.

The Human Cost Behind the Fraud

The criminal infrastructure behind these operations carries a layer of exploitation that extends well beyond the American victims losing money. Many of the individuals staffing these scam compounds were themselves recruited under false pretenses, promised legitimate employment abroad, then stripped of their documents and forced to work as fraud operators under threat of physical abuse.

The Department of Justice’s announcement acknowledged this dimension directly. The same networks defrauding Americans are operating through forced labor. Dismantling them is simultaneously a financial crime enforcement action and a human trafficking investigation, and the jurisdictional complexity of pursuing criminal networks embedded inside sovereign territory in Southeast Asia makes the $580 million seizure figure considerably more operationally difficult to achieve than it might appear on paper.

How the Strike Force Is Built

The Scam Center Strike Force, formed in November 2025, coordinates across four federal agencies: the Department of Justice, the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, and the Department of the Treasury. That cross-agency structure is significant. Cryptocurrency seizures of this scale require simultaneous action across financial intelligence, law enforcement, and prosecutorial channels, no single agency has the full toolkit.

The DOJ has stated that seized funds will be pursued through forfeiture proceedings with the explicit goal of returning assets to victims to the maximum extent the legal process allows. How much of the $580 million ultimately reaches victims will depend on how successfully those forfeiture proceedings navigate what tends to be a lengthy and complex legal process, but the stated intent places victim restitution at the center of the enforcement rationale rather than as an afterthought.

What Three Months of Results Signals

A $580 million outcome in the first quarter of operation either reflects unusually favorable early conditions or suggests the strike force went into operation with intelligence that had already been gathered and was waiting on the institutional framework to act on it. Possibly both.

Either way, the pace is notable. $10 billion leaves American victims annually. Law enforcement now has a purpose-built, multi-agency structure specifically targeting the networks responsible. The gap between those two numbers is still enormous, but it is, for the first time, a gap with a dedicated operation working to close it.

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