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 cybersecurity firm pulled the back off a Telegram-based scam network and found the same engine running under fifteen different paint jobs. The brands were fake. The dashboards were fake. The "Welcome to FEMITBOT platform" was the only honest line in the whole machine.
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.
Jason Burt spent twenty-two years inside the agency that polices the screen you trade on. On May 1, 2026, he walks out the door, and the room he leaves behind is quieter, leaner, and pointed at a smaller list of cases.
On April 18, 2026, a single misconfigured security checkpoint inside a cross-chain crypto bridge gave North Korea's Lazarus Group the opening to drain $290 million from Kelp DAO's liquid restaking protocol. What followed in the next 24 hours was not just a theft. It was a controlled demolition of $292 million in leveraged positions across a market that had no idea the floor had already been removed.
On April 26, 2026, someone found a contract Scallop DeFi had stopped using two years ago and walked through it like a door left open in an empty building. The money was gone in minutes. The auditors had looked at everything except the thing that mattered.
In March 2026, the SEC settled a three-year case against one of crypto's most powerful operators for ten million dollars and a charge that required only negligence, then dismissed everything else. The people who bought the tokens when the trading looked real got nothing.
BehindMLM's 2026 state of the industry report landed this week, and the numbers inside it describe a world where the same machine keeps getting new paint jobs. Before you forward that invite to someone you love, read what the machine looked like last year.
Ben Pasternak built three consecutive crypto tokens, told investors he had no stake in any of them, and walked away with a platform that processed $6 billion in trades while retail holders were left with coins worth fractions of a cent. This is what the machine looked like from the inside.