US DOJ seeks forfeiture of more than $25M in crypto tied to romance and investment scams

The US Department of Justice has filed five civil forfeiture complaints targeting more than $25 million in crypto allegedly connected to international investment, romance, and recovery scams. For high-risk payment operators, the point is simple: the fraud chain here runs through fake trading platforms, wallet layering, and cross-border laundering networks, which is exactly the sort of mess that shows up later as chargeback pressure, frozen funds, and messy source-of-funds questions.

1. The US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the US Secret Service’s Washington Field Office said the assets were recovered through separate investigations by the Cyber Fraud Task Force. Investigators identified several laundering networks and said they confirmed thousands of victims worldwide who were tricked into thinking they were making legitimate digital asset investments.
2. The largest complaint seeks about $12.1 million tied to romance schemes that defrauded more than 200 victims. According to the DOJ, the proceeds were routed through intermediary addresses and commingled with other victim funds, which is the classic problem for PSPs and exchanges trying to trace ownership after the fact.
3. Another complaint seeks $10.4 million traced to more than 270 suspected victim transactions. Three smaller cases involved fake investment accounts and a secondary scam that offered to recover previously stolen funds, which means victims were being hit twice: first by the investment fraud, then by the recovery pitch.
4. The DOJ said the launderers were predominantly located in Southeast Asia, with related IP addresses in China, Malaysia and Cambodia. That jurisdictional spread matters because the operational stack is not just social engineering; it is also infrastructure, and it spans the places where accounts are opened, wallets are moved, and funds are cashed out.
5. The complaints follow Operation First Light 2026, an Interpol-coordinated effort involving 97 countries and territories that resulted in 5,811 arrests and the interception of $283 million in illicit assets. Interpol said the operation identified more than 142,000 victims and blocked more than 31,000 bank accounts. Thai authorities also uncovered a network that allegedly converted romance-scam proceeds into crypto and used cross-chain token swaps to obscure the trail; one wallet linked to a suspected money launderer processed more than $122.5 million in crypto over 10 months.

US authorities have also moved on similar crypto proceeds before: in February, federal agents seized over $61 million in USDT stablecoin from addresses allegedly used to launder funds from fraudulent investment platforms. The recurring pattern is the same: trust-building through romance, a push into fake trading platforms, then rapid movement through multiple wallets to make recovery harder for everyone except the forensic team.