ACCORDING to The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ), the seizure involved $61 million worth of Tether linked to pig butchering crypto scams, with the confiscated funds traced to cryptocurrency addresses used to launder criminally derived proceeds from investment scams. The DoJ notes that criminal actors and professional money launderers use cyber-enabled fraud to defraud victims and conceal ill‑gotten gains, and quoted HSI Charlotte Acting Special Agent in Charge Kyle D. Burns.
The release describes how scammers cultivate relationships on dating and social media apps, trafficking victims into scam compounds in Southeast Asia and coercing them to con the public online. It adds that once victims’ money moves to a wallet under scammers’ control, it is routed through many other wallets to obscure its origins. In a related note, Tether said it has frozen around $4.2 billion in assets linked to illicit activity to date, including nearly $250 million related to scam networks since June 2025. The DoJ announcement came on 27 February 2026.