U.S. Files Record $225.3 Million Crypto Confidence-Scam Forfeiture Case
The Justice Department filed a civil forfeiture complaint against more than $225.3 million in cryptocurrency tied to alleged investment-fraud laundering networks, calling it the largest cryptocurrency seizure in U.S. Secret Service history. The government did not identify Bitcoin specifically among the assets.
On June 18, 2025, the U.S. Justice Department filed a civil forfeiture complaint in federal court in Washington, D.C., against more than $225.3 million in cryptocurrency allegedly connected to investment-fraud and money-laundering schemes. Investigators from the U.S. Secret Service and FBI said blockchain analysis linked the funds to a network that dispersed proceeds across large numbers of cryptocurrency addresses and accounts in order to obscure their origin, ownership and control.
The government described the underlying frauds as cryptocurrency confidence scams, in which victims were induced to believe they were making legitimate investments. The complaint discussed dozens of confirmed U.S. victims and more than 400 suspected victims worldwide. The Secret Service called the seizure the largest cryptocurrency seizure in its history, while the Justice Department said the network had executed hundreds of thousands of blockchain transactions. Tether was specifically thanked for assisting the investigation.
The Justice Department’s public materials did not identify Bitcoin as a specific seized asset, and the case should not be read as a Bitcoin forfeiture. Its relevance lies instead in the enforcement system growing around blockchain-traced fraud: federal investigators were using transaction analysis, asset freezes and civil forfeiture at a scale large enough to recover hundreds of millions of dollars from global digital-asset networks. The case documented how cryptocurrency’s traceable public ledgers and centralized service providers were increasingly being used together in large financial-crime investigations.