The US Secret Service has built one of the world’s largest seized crypto war chests, confiscating nearly $400 million in digital assets.
Key Takeaways:
- Secret Service has seized nearly $400M in crypto from online scams over the past decade.
- Investigators traced funds using blockchain analysis, helping claw back millions in stolen assets.
- Global training led by the agency has exposed scam networks and boosted cross-border enforcement.
Much of the crypto haul now sits in a single cold-storage wallet, making the Secret Service an unlikely heavyweight among the world’s largest crypto custodians, according to a report from Bloomberg.
Investigators from the agency’s Global Investigative Operations Center (GIOC) have unraveled countless fraud schemes, many starting with simple messages luring victims to slick-looking crypto investment sites.
Scammers Dangle Fake Profits, Vanish With Victims’ Crypto: Secret Service
The sites often show early profits to coax larger deposits, only to disappear without a trace.
“That’s how they do it,” said Jamie Lam, an investigative analyst with the Secret Service, during a recent training session in Bermuda.
“They’ll send you a photo of a really good-looking guy or girl. But it’s probably some old guy in Russia.”
Using tools like domain records, blockchain analysis, and occasionally catching a scammer’s VPN slip-up, Lam’s team has traced illicit funds across borders.
These investigations have helped the agency claw back millions and highlight how crypto’s promise of anonymity can also be its Achilles’ heel for criminals.
At the forefront of the agency’s crypto strategy is Kali Smith, who leads efforts to train law enforcement worldwide in unmasking digital criminals.
Her team has held workshops in over 60 countries, focusing on places where weak oversight or lax residency programs attract scammers.
“Sometimes after just a week-long training, they can be like, ‘Wow, we didn’t even realize this was happening here,’” Smith said.
One case involved an Idaho teenager blackmailed with compromising photos, with payments laundered through another teen coerced into acting as a money mule.
Analysts tracked the funds through nearly 6,000 transactions to an account linked to a Nigerian passport. British police arrested the suspect upon arrival in Guildford, England.
To recover stolen funds, the Secret Service has worked with firms like Coinbase and Tether, which have helped trace and freeze assets.
In one case, the agency reclaimed $225 million in USDT tied to romance-investment scams.
Crypto Hacks, Scams Cost Investors $2.2B in H1 2025: CertiK
Crypto investors lost over $2.2 billion to hacks, scams, and breaches in the first half of 2025, driven largely by wallet compromises and phishing attacks, according to CertiK’s latest security report.
Wallet breaches alone caused $1.7 billion in losses across just 34 incidents, while phishing scams accounted for over $410 million across 132 attacks.
Two major incidents, including Bybit’s $1.5 billion hack in February and Cetus Protocol’s $225 million exploit in May, skewed the year’s losses upward, together accounting for nearly $1.78 billion.
Without these, losses align more closely with previous years at around $690 million.
Ethereum remained the primary target, suffering over $1.6 billion in losses across 175 events.
The report also pointed to rising sophistication of phishing schemes and ongoing risks from social engineering, urging crypto users to verify links, avoid suspicious sites, and use hardware wallets.
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