The SEC charged Nathan Fuller of Cypress, Texas with running a $12.3M scheme that promised AI-powered crypto trading and, according to the complaint, delivered a Ponzi. The bot was the costume. The wire was the work.
A May 15 raid on a Parañaque house exposed a love-scam factory built on dating apps, deepfake faces, and a crypto pipe that sent foreign hearts and savings to a wallet they would never see again.
An international takedown announced this spring pulled 276 people and $701 million out of the pig butchering economy. The story is not the seizure. The story is the building the messages came from.
A woman in Round Rock thought she was learning to trade crypto with a man she met online. She was learning to feed a building full of strangers a thousand dollars at a time. An Austin arrest this week put one face on a machine that has consumed at least $75 billion since 2020.
A pseudonymous investigator points at a chart that climbed 537 percent on no news and asks who was holding the float. The answer, on-chain, is almost everyone in the room.
Federal prosecutors say a 19-year-old Canadian on an expired visa and his 28-year-old Miami co-defendant ran a $13M crypto theft operation built on phone calls. The crime scene was not a smart contract. It was a voice on the other end of the line.
Federal prosecutors say two Chinese nationals managed a compound in Burma where trafficked workers were forced to run cryptocurrency romance scams against Americans. The Justice Department has restrained more than $700 million tied to the network. The victims thought they were talking to someone who cared.
Over five years, a New Zealand woman sent roughly $800,000 NZD to a man she believed was a retired American four-star general. He was a character built from stolen photos, AI-generated images, and a forged court document. Police in Dunedin say the investigation is ongoing.
A 19-year-old Canadian who overstayed his visa allegedly worked the phones while a Miami car-rental operator allegedly worked the laundry. Federal prosecutors say the call was the lock, and the wallets were the room behind it.
Christopher Delgado told a television camera he failed his investors. The federal complaint says he ran a three-year crypto Ponzi that drained more than 2,000 people while he bought houses, watches, and silence. The math of what remained tells the rest.
On April 17, Albanian and Austrian police walked into three call centers in Tirana and pulled the plug on a €50M crypto investment fraud. The room they found is the room every victim was already inside without knowing it.
A Pennsylvania-registered crypto trading shop run out of Miami sold itself as a Binance and BitMEX-tied trading desk earning up to 60% a month. The CFTC says it was a virtual house of cards, and a Florida federal judge made the collapse final.
A pig-butchering Ponzi run under the names BG Wealth Sharing and DSJ Exchange collected what on-chain investigators estimate may exceed $150 million before the U.S. seized its domain in early May. The withdrawal button had already been turned off.
A coordinated international crackdown announced this week pulled 276 people out of crypto scam compounds and seized $701.9 million in laundered crypto. The arrests do not end the machine. They show you the floor plan.
An international sweep in late April pulled 276 people out of pig butchering scam centers. The script those workers ran is older than crypto. The room they ran it from is what changed.
Alex Mashinsky, the man who told 1.7 million people their crypto was safe, is now sitting in a federal prison cell and writing $10 million checks to the government he defied. The rest of the bill, $4.72 billion, is suspended. Not forgiven. Suspended.