U.S. authorities are seeking to seize more than $25 million in cryptocurrency allegedly connected to investment and romance scams, filing five civil forfeiture complaints aimed at recovering digital assets laundered through fraud networks operating largely from Southeast Asia.

Five Civil Forfeiture Complaints Filed

The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia said on July 21, 2026, that it had filed five civil forfeiture complaints to recover cryptocurrency tied to fraud, according to a Justice Department announcement. The cases followed separate investigations by the U.S. Secret Service Washington Field Office into international schemes that targeted residents of the United States and Canada.

The complaint amounts listed in the release were approximately $10,400,913, $12,086,914, $1,230,900, $2,392,231, and $285,000. Together, those figures total $26,395,958.

In the first investigation, authorities identified more than 270 suspected victim transactions connected to the complaint seeking roughly $10.4 million. A second investigation involved more than 200 victims allegedly defrauded through online romance schemes and was tied to a complaint seeking about $12,086,914.

The filings are civil forfeiture actions, not criminal convictions. Civil forfeiture allows the government to target the proceeds of crime through the property itself rather than through a criminal prosecution of an individual, a distinction that matters when alleged perpetrators operate abroad and remain beyond the practical reach of U.S. criminal jurisdiction. Prosecutors are asking the U.S. District Court to allow recovery of the assets, but the complaints do not mean that named defendants have been convicted.

Romance and Investment Fraud Schemes

The Justice Department said the fraud schemes relied on tactics common to both romance scams and investment scams. In such cases, fraudsters typically build trust with targets over time before directing them to transfer funds, often presenting a personal relationship or a supposed high-yield investment opportunity as the reason to move money into cryptocurrency.

Once funds are moved on-chain, tracing and recovery can become more difficult as assets are split among wallets and platforms. In practice, however, the public nature of blockchain ledgers has increasingly allowed law enforcement agencies and blockchain analytics firms to follow fund flows across services, enabling seizures like those announced here even when victims have no way to recover assets on their own. In the five cases described by the Justice Department, the alleged money launderers were predominantly located in Southeast Asia, with IP addresses in China, Malaysia, and Cambodia—a region that the United Nations and other bodies have identified as a hub for large-scale scam compounds, some of which have been linked to forced labor.

The broader scale of crypto-related fraud has been significant. The FBI's IC3 2025 Annual Report found that cryptocurrency investment fraud was the highest source of reported financial losses to Americans in 2025, with $7.2 billion in reported losses.

Scam Center Strike Force Role

The seizure effort falls under the DOJ-led Scam Center Strike Force, which was launched in November 2025 to target Southeast Asian crypto-investment fraud infrastructure. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Ferris Pirro linked the seizure to that initiative.

“This $25 million seizure is a direct result of the Scam Center Strike Force I launched in November 2025,” Pirro said.

The Strike Force page states that its crypto seizure team had restrained $832,831,006.15 from these schemes as of June 18, 2026, placing the latest complaints within a broader recovery campaign. The effort follows other high-value enforcement actions, including a recent DOJ move to seize $225.3 million in crypto fraud proceeds and a parallel Secret Service-led seizure investigation.

A forfeiture filing does not automatically return money to victims. The assets must go through the court process before any distribution can occur, and outcomes for the more than 470 combined victims across the two largest complaints remain pending. In past U.S. crypto forfeiture cases, victim restitution has typically depended on whether claimants can be identified and verified through the court process, which can take months or longer.

The cases also reflect a pattern seen in earlier enforcement actions, including a $1 billion crypto seizure tied to Iran: digital assets moved through fraud networks may remain traceable by investigators after victims lose access to them.