In brief
- The DOJ launched a new interagency Scam Center Strike Force to dismantle international “pig butchering” crypto scams tied to Chinese crime networks.
- U.S. Attorney for D.C. Jeanine Pirro said such schemes stole up to $135 billion from Americans in 2024, with her office already seizing $480 million in stolen crypto.
- Experts praised the initiative as a major shift toward a coordinated federal offensive against global crypto fraud networks.
The U.S. Department of Justice’s D.C. office announced an interagency initiative Wednesday specially designed to dismantle international crypto scam operations known as “pig butchering” schemes.
The Scam Center Strike Force will work across the DOJ, FBI, Secret Service, U.S. Treasury, and other government agencies to root out transnational criminal networks that, in recent years, have made billions of dollars scamming people across the world with fake crypto sites and by assuming false identities on social media platforms.
The initiative was announced Wednesday by Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. During her remarks, Pirro specifically tied the scourge of online crypto scams to Chinese organized crime networks.
“We’re here today to target a growing epidemic,” Pirro said. “Crypto investment fraud scams perpetrated by organized Chinese crime syndicates that successfully target Americans and victimize them.”
Pirro claimed that such schemes likely defrauded Americans out of $135 billion in 2024 alone. She said that her office has already seized $400 million worth of crypto from bad actors, and today will reveal the seizure of another $80 million in stolen crypto that the DOJ will seek to return to victims.
“This new Strike Force’s mission is to identify and charge the leaders of these cryptocurrency scam organizations, to trace and to seize stolen funds [for] victims, and to seize and disable United States infrastructure that is the manner and the means of the scam itself,” Pirro added.
The U.S. Attorney also tied the initiative to President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto agenda, arguing that as the president has pushed for Americans to embrace the novel sector, consumers should feel safe to trust it, and not fear scams when transacting with crypto online.
“There are no tricks that can be a part of cryptocurrency,” Pirro said.
At Wednesday’s press conference, a Treasury Department official also announced sanctions against a militant group it said operates at a cyber scam compound in Burma, and inflicts violence against human trafficking victims forced to work in the scam center against their will. Treasury also sanctioned two companies and a Thai national tied it said were linked to the Burmese militant group and Chinese organized crime.
Leading crypto security experts have long argued that the U.S. government has failed to tackle pig butchering scams—dubbed as such because scammers build trust slowly with victims, “fattening them up” before stealing their money—with a coordinated inter-agency approach.
Instead, agencies like the Treasury Department and the FBI have focused on different elements of these crimes without acknowledging their shared root in the Chinese black markets that facilitate most crypto crime, experts at blockchain intelligence firm TRM told Decrypt earlier this year.
TRM’s leadership welcomed today’s announcement as a much-needed shift in approach for the federal government—one that will allow the U.S. government to play a coordinated offense against global crypto crime networks, as opposed to piecemeal defense.
“The Scam Center Strike Force is the clearest statement yet that the United States intends to fight back with the full power of the state,” TRM Head of Global Policy Ari Redbord told Decrypt. “Not in isolation, but in coordination: DOJ prosecuting, Treasury sanctioning, FBI investigating, FinCEN analyzing, State pressuring, and industry tracing.”
Last month, the DOJ announced the seizure of $14 billion worth of Bitcoin from an alleged crypto scam network based out of Cambodia, with ties to China. The operation constituted the largest forfeiture action in the DOJ’s history, and involved criminal charges, financial sanctions, diplomatic overtures, and on-chain sleuthing.
TRM’s Redbord said the action—which involved the coordinated actions of the DOJ, FBI, DEA, and State Department—represents a model of how the Scam Center Strike Force can work on rooting out crypto crime in the future.
“It showed that when law enforcement, regulators, and intelligence agencies operate as one, the model for dismantling global cyber-enabled fraud becomes not just reactive, but proactively disruptive,” Redbord said.
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