Key Takeaways
- The enforcement actions came through the District of Columbia’s Scam Center Strike Force
- Pirro also made clear that recovered assets would go toward victim restitution rather than government coffers
In a significant development, the US Department of Justice announced on Thursday that it has frozen, seized, and forfeited more than $578 million worth of digital assets stolen by Chinese transnational criminal organisations running cryptocurrency fraud schemes against American residents.
The enforcement actions came through the District of Columbia’s Scam Center Strike Force, which US Attorney Jeanine Pirro launched in last November after her appointment to the federal prosecutor role. The seized funds were traced to criminal groups operating websites and social media platforms specifically designed to target victims in the United States, as per reports.
Meanwhile, Pirro also made clear that recovered assets would go toward victim restitution rather than government coffers. “Seizures of cryptocurrency is one important part of the Scam Center Strike Force’s work,” she stated. “Through the legal process, my Office will seek to forfeit these funds and return them to victims to the maximum extent possible.”
Her comments indicate the confiscated crypto will not feed into the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve that President Donald Trump established through executive order in March 2025. BitcoinTreasuries.NET data suggests US authorities may hold as many as 328,372 Bitcoin accumulated through various criminal seizures.
Commenting on the operational complexity, Kyle D Burns, Acting Special Agent in Charge at HSI Charlotte, said, “Criminal actors and professional money launderers use cyber-enabled fraud schemes to swindle their victims and conceal their ill-gotten gains,” Burns said.
“Once the victims’ money transferred to a cryptocurrency wallet under the scammers’ control, the crooks quickly routed that money through many other wallets to hide the nature, source, control, and ownership of that stolen money,” the Justice Department explained in Thursday’s announcement.
According to Blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, incidents involving impersonation scams tied to crypto climbed approximately 1,400% year-over-year in 2025. The average amount stolen through impersonation scams simultaneously increased by 600% during the same period.
Meanwhile, a separate Justice Department announcement this week detailed the seizure of $61 million worth of Tether allegedly connected to pig butchering operations. Officials traced those confiscated funds to cryptocurrency addresses used for laundering criminally derived proceeds stolen from victims of cryptocurrency investment scams.
Tether issued a coordinated statement revealing it has frozen around $4.2 billion in assets linked to illicit activity to date. The stablecoin issuer specified that nearly $250 million of that total relates to scam networks frozen since June 2025 alone.
