Topic
Long-con investment fraud in which operators build trust over months before routing victims into fake crypto platforms.
Alabama sentenced crypto-scam courier Kuan Tsou to serve one year and repay $211,000 taken from an elderly Montgomery resident. Because the resident kept paying other strangers after his arrest, the order covers about 78% of the roughly $270,000 investigators say was lost.
Reality
Trung Nguyen Van faces a US money-laundering charge over crypto wallets that the DOJ says took in $53 million from fraud between 2018 and 2024. The trail was still good enough to charge him years later, and the department's own figures show the wallets forwarded nearly all of the money.
Reality
Two Thai businessmen say a Homeland Security agent asked informally, without a warrant, and Tether flagged ten Ethereum addresses holding $42.4m of USDT that the men had bought on the secondary market without ever opening a Tether account.
Perspective Coverage
4 publishersReality
Treasury puts Xinbi's throughput above $24bn since 2022 and TRM Labs says $36bn, but the Secret Service and Elliptic have frozen $52.8m, and the last two guarantee markets designated this way were replaced rather than removed.
Perspective Coverage
3 publishersReality
The GUARD Act, passed by the House on Tuesday, would let five existing Justice Department grant programs pay for the analysts, training and blockchain tracing software that local police say they lack in scam cases.
Reality
Elliptic and the US Secret Service froze 52 wallets holding $52.8 million in USDT on September 8. US sanctions followed a day later, Telegram deleted the channels the same day, and Xinbi says it is moving to a stablecoin nobody can freeze.
Reality
Tether says the Justice Department's Scam Center Strike Force thanked it after two seized wallets and 47 restrained ones added up to $52 million, about 1% of the $5 billion the issuer says it has helped lock.
Reality
Treasury's study draws on reports from about 1,300 institutions filed between September 2023 and December 2025, and it says monthly volume grew almost 11 percent while each filer saw only one phase of a scam.
Reality
American and British prosecutors have agreed to decide between themselves where scam-center cases get charged, and an industry disruption event in October will show who outside government is expected to act on that timetable.
Reality
A memorandum signed on August 12 lets vetted US firms run offensive cyber operations against foreign criminal networks. The unpriced term is who absorbs the downside.
Reality