U.S. prosecutors have seized more than $25 million in cryptocurrency connected to international fraud schemes that defrauded thousands of victims across the United States and Canada, the Justice Department announced Tuesday.

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, working alongside the U.S. Secret Service's Washington Field Office, filed five civil forfeiture complaints on Tuesday, each tied to a separate investigation into fraudulent cryptocurrency investment platforms and online romance scams. These scam types frequently overlap, with fraudsters cultivating trust through dating apps or social media before steering victims to sham trading platforms that display fabricated returns. Law enforcement agents said they traced illicit proceeds through hundreds of intermediary wallet addresses, where funds had been commingled with money stolen from other victims.

Today, @USAttyPirro and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, together with the U.S. Secret Service Washington Field Office, announced that multiple investigations conducted by their Cyber Fraud Task Force have resulted in the seizure of more than $25 million…

— U.S. Attorney DC (@USAO_DC) July 21, 2026

Breakdown of the Five Cases

The largest forfeiture complaint seeks approximately $12.1 million linked to romance scams that affected more than 200 individuals. The second-largest involves roughly $10.4 million flagged by Canadian authorities across more than 270 suspected victim transactions.

The three remaining cases range from $285,000 to $2.4 million. One of these involved scammers who posed as recovery agents, offering to retrieve funds that victims had already lost in a prior fraud—a well-documented secondary scheme that exploits victims' desperation to recoup their losses.

In each case, prosecutors identified launderers who were primarily based in Southeast Asia, with IP addresses traced to China, Malaysia, and Cambodia.

The Scam Center Strike Force

The seizure was carried out under the auspices of the Scam Center Strike Force, launched in November 2025 by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro. Investigators "cut through complex laundering schemes" to reach the funds, Pirro said in a statement.

The five investigations remain open. With this latest recovery, the strike force's total haul now exceeds $800 million.

Prosecutors emphasized that the launderers' operations in Southeast Asia are part of a broader scam economy increasingly run from the region, which Interpol has flagged as a global threat. Much of the cryptocurrency investment and romance fraud is operated out of forced-labor compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, where trafficked workers are coerced into defrauding victims worldwide.

In October, U.S. and UK authorities charged Cambodia's Prince Group and seized more than 127,000 BTC from the network—then worth approximately $12 billion, marking the largest civil seizure and forfeiture in the DOJ's history.