Federal agents in North Carolina have seized nearly $8.5 million in Tether, a cryptocurrency pegged to the U.S. dollar, as part of an ongoing crackdown on investment scams known as “pig butchering schemes.”
Authorities say the funds were traced to a wallet connected to money stolen from victims, some of whom lost life savings after being lured into fake cryptocurrency investments.
The FBI’s James C. Barnacle Jr. said the seizure helps claw back money that belongs to victims; he noted that some lost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Investigators said the scammers typically initiate contact through random texts or social media messages, build trust—often posing as romantic interests—and guide victims to phony trading platforms promising big returns. When victims try to withdraw their money, scammers freeze the accounts or demand extra payments, sometimes even impersonating firms that claim to recover lost funds for a fee.
Investigators said people can avoid falling victim to cryptocurrency or romance scam fraud by following these steps:
- If someone you don’t know contacts you online or by phone, never give any personal information. FBI advises you should always ignore a random stranger’s attempt to connect or befriend you, if you don’t already know them in real life.
- Do not invest money based on advice from someone you’ve met solely online.
- Verify the validity of any investment opportunity or cryptocurrency investment with your own independent research, separate and apart from what the unknown scammer tells you.
- If you already invested funds and believe you are or may be a victim of a scheme, do not pay any additional fees or taxes to withdraw your money. Just cap your losses.
- Do not pay for services that claim to recover lost funds. It’s a trap.
- Be on the lookout for domain names that impersonate legitimate financial institutions, especially cryptocurrency exchanges.
- Misspelled URLs, often with just a slight deviation, like an extra letter or missing one letter, from the actual financial institutions’ real website, may be, indeed almost certainly are, fake.
- If it sounds too good to be true, it is. There is no such thing as a get-rich-quick scheme. Certainly not from a random stranger you never met in person who targeted you on the internet.
