The US Department of Justice sent a lawsuit of Civil confiscation of cryptocurrencies to the County of Colombia in the amount of $ 225.3 million. These assets are related to fraudulent schemes for investment in cryptocurrency, the Ministry of Justice said.

According to the press release of the department, law enforcement agencies analyzed suspicious transactions using a blockchain. This helped them determine that crypto acts were obtained as a result of illegal activity. The lawsuit states that the cryptocurrency addresses at which these assets are stored are involved in a difficult scheme of money laundering. Hundreds of thousands of transactions were performed through it, and the funds received from the victims of fraudulent schemes were distributed to various addresses, in attempts to hide the source of illegally received funds.

It is assumed that in this scheme more than 400 deceived victims have lost their money, whose losses have millions of dollars. This withdrawal will become the largest confiscation of cryptocurrency in the history of the USSS Secret Service (USS), said Special Agent Sean Bradstreet from the regional USS Office in San Francisco. He added that the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) also took part in tracking illegal transactions so that the stolen crypto acts could be returned to their legal owners.

“Fraudulent crypto schemes harm Americans whose annual losses are billions of dollars. This undermines the confidence of the population in cryptocurrencies. Law enforcement officers will not stand aside until the criminals lure the money from nothing suspecting victims, believing that they are making legal investments, ”Bradstrite said.

According to the report of the Center for complaints about the Internet, at the FBI, in 2024 the declared losses from fraud with cryptocurrencies exceeded $ 9 billion. In a special risk zone, older people were in the special risk-their losses reached $ 2.84 billion.