Eight years after Ruja Ignatova disappeared with billions, German and Guernsey authorities pulled £8.5 million back from the dark. For the people who bought OneCoin, the wire is real. The coin never was.
Federal prosecutors say two men in the Republic of Georgia ran a Bitcoin laundering service called AudiA6 for almost five years, washing ransomware payouts and dark web revenue through 10,333 transactions. The arrests happened on a Wednesday. The machine had been running since 2021.
Indonesian police and the FBI raided an office building in Solo Baru and found the machinery of a romance scam laid out like a call center. The models were real. The portfolios were not.
A Canadian teenager pleaded guilty in Miami to laundering $13M in stolen Bitcoin after impersonating Google support to drain a victim's wallet. The traffic stop that ended it started with a white Rolls-Royce.
An Incheon indictment puts a number on a quiet trade: $554 million in alleged criminal crypto, converted to Korean won, routed through a Cambodian payment system Washington has called a primary money laundering concern. The man at the keyboard kept $1.2 million in fees.
An Arab woman wired roughly Dh1.1 million ($301K USD) to two strangers running a fake crypto trading firm in the UAE. When she sued in Dubai civil court, the case was dismissed. The mechanism that took her money was designed to make sure of that.