A Cobb County resident is set to recover hundreds of thousands of dollars lost to a fake cryptocurrency platform, after Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office traced the money to a crypto exchange and secured a court order forcing its return.

How the fake platform built trust

According to the Attorney General’s Office, a stranger first contacted the victim through social media. Invoking the names of mutual acquaintances to create a sense of familiarity, the scammer gradually steered the conversation toward a supposedly lucrative crypto trade.

Early on, the platform allowed the victim to withdraw a small amount — enough to build confidence and keep the deposits coming. The account then displayed fake profits, making the balance appear to climb. Only after the victim had sunk hundreds of thousands of dollars into the scheme did the site report that everything was gone, with the perpetrator claiming the investment had disappeared.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) traced much of the victim’s funds to a cryptocurrency exchange. From there, Carr’s White Collar and Cyber Crime Unit, working with its Investigations Section, obtained the court order that compelled the exchange to return the assets. The nonprofit Operation Shamrock, which assists victims of crypto scams, worked the case alongside GBI.

“Cryptocurrency scams are designed to exploit trust, urgency, and the promise of easy financial gain,” GBI Director Chris Hosey said in the announcement. He added that anyone who has been a victim should report the crime to local law enforcement.

The scheme matches what federal advisories call “pig butchering”: scammers spend weeks winning a target’s trust to pull in more money before vanishing. Cases like this also show how recovery can depend on fast tracing and coordination between investigators, prosecutors, and exchanges before funds are moved beyond reach.

Georgia’s new kiosk law raises the guardrails

The recovery is the latest in a string of similar cases. A week earlier, Carr’s office announced a comparable recovery for an elderly couple in Oconee County, who were duped by someone posing as an FTC agent into moving cash into a virtual currency kiosk after a fake bank-breach warning.

In July, a retired Cobb County couple lost roughly $800,000 to a scheme that used an AI-generated “ghost site” to fake real-time gains. In December, prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia returned $1.7 million, and in January, Massachusetts prosecutors asked a court to seize about $200,000 taken in a romance-investment scam. In both cases, agents traced the money on-chain before prosecutors went to court.

The recoveries come weeks after Governor Brian Kemp signed House Bill 945 into law, effective July 1. The statute requires virtual currency kiosks to post a sign stating that losses from fraud or mistakes may not be recovered. It also limits kiosk transaction fees to 18% and obliges operators to offer refunds to first-time scam victims within 72 hours. Banks, meanwhile, may place temporary holds on accounts they suspect are being used to financially exploit an older customer.