DOJ Bags Another $25M in Crypto, This Time From Southeast Asia's "Pig Butchering" Pipeline 🐖

U.S. prosecutors have seized more than $25 million in cryptocurrency tied to international scams that defrauded thousands of victims across the United States and Canada, the Justice Department said Tuesday. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, working with the Secret Service's Washington Field Office, filed five civil forfeiture complaints, each linked to a separate investigation into fraudulent crypto investment platforms and online romance schemes. Agents traced illicit proceeds through hundreds of intermediary wallet addresses, where funds had been commingled with money from other victims.

The largest complaint seeks roughly $12.1 million tied to romance scams that hit more than 200 people, followed by about $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, including one in which scammers posed as recovery agents offering to retrieve funds stolen in an earlier fraud. Prosecutors said the launderers were mostly based in Southeast Asia, with IP addresses traced to China, Malaysia, and Cambodia.

The seizures stem from 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 money, Pirro said in a statement. The five investigations remain open, with the recovered funds bringing the strike force's total haul past $800 million since inception.

Much of the fraud is operated out of forced-labor compounds in Cambodia, Myanmar, and Laos, where trafficked workers are coerced into defrauding victims worldwide through so-called "pig butchering" schemes. In October, U.S. and UK authorities charged Cambodia's Prince Group and seized more than 127,000 $BTC from the network, then worth about $12 billion, in what the DOJ described as the largest civil seizure and forfeiture in its history.