Authorities Move to Seize $200K in Tether from Cryptocurrency Scam

In relation to a $1.1 million pig-butchering scheme, the United States has filed a forfeiture lawsuit to recover roughly $200,000 worth of USDT stored on Binance. The purpose of this action is to recover money connected to two fraudulent schemes that defrauded an unnamed victim of a sizable amount.

Court documents from the District Court of Columbia outline how an unnamed victim lost over $1 million in two separate scams. The first scam, occurring between January 2021 and December 2022, involved a scammer named Eva Markus, who posed as an engineering consultant from Boston, temporarily working on a mining project in Turkey. The victim met Markus on Facebook and developed a romantic relationship, communicating via phone and email. Markus, also present on LinkedIn, misled the victim into believing she owned a diamond mine that had exploded. She claimed she needed funds to hire an attorney to return to America, prompting the victim to transfer over $400,000.

In the second scam, the same victim developed another romantic relationship with someone named Lisa Warren on Facebook. Warren posed as a crypto investor and convinced the victim to invest $55,000 in Bitcoin (BTC). Gradually, she persuaded the victim to sell their home and invest the proceeds, resulting in a total of about $600,000 in cryptocurrency being transferred. The victim only managed to retrieve $15,000 before realizing the deception and reporting it to the police.

Tracing and Seizing the Funds

The FBI tracked some of the fraudulent cryptocurrency transactions to a Binance account under the name of Izuchukwu Henry Okolo. Okolo had converted the BTC to 196,721 USDT. Binance, upon discovering the suspicious activity, froze the funds and alerted the FBI. The seized funds are currently in FBI custody and will be transferred to the United States Marshals Service in the District of Columbia.

According to the court filings, the USDT in question is suspected to be proceeds from “wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering, and money laundering conspiracy.” The complaint seeks to recover the stolen funds and hold those responsible for the scam accountable. The detailed steps taken by the U.S. authorities highlight their commitment to cracking down on cryptocurrency-related fraud and protecting victims from such sophisticated schemes.