Four years after Singapore lending platform Hodlnaut froze 17,513 customer accounts, prosecutors charged its former CEO with six counts of fraud over the Telegram posts that kept the money flowing in after the company had already lost it.
On-chain investigators say a phishing site impersonating Uniswap drained at least $400,000 from multiple wallets in late May 2026. The bait was a sponsored Google ad sitting one line above the real one.
A May 15 raid on a Parañaque house exposed a love-scam factory built on dating apps, deepfake faces, and a crypto pipe that sent foreign hearts and savings to a wallet they would never see again.
An international takedown announced this spring pulled 276 people and $701 million out of the pig butchering economy. The story is not the seizure. The story is the building the messages came from.
A woman in Round Rock thought she was learning to trade crypto with a man she met online. She was learning to feed a building full of strangers a thousand dollars at a time. An Austin arrest this week put one face on a machine that has consumed at least $75 billion since 2020.
Federal prosecutors say a 19-year-old Canadian on an expired visa and his 28-year-old Miami co-defendant ran a $13M crypto theft operation built on phone calls. The crime scene was not a smart contract. It was a voice on the other end of the line.
Poland passed its crypto law on Friday. The same week, prosecutors confirmed that one of the country's biggest exchanges had been running on a wallet nobody could open for nearly four years.
Federal prosecutors say two Chinese nationals managed a compound in Burma where trafficked workers were forced to run cryptocurrency romance scams against Americans. The Justice Department has restrained more than $700 million tied to the network. The victims thought they were talking to someone who cared.
Over five years, a New Zealand woman sent roughly $800,000 NZD to a man she believed was a retired American four-star general. He was a character built from stolen photos, AI-generated images, and a forged court document. Police in Dunedin say the investigation is ongoing.
A 19-year-old Canadian who overstayed his visa allegedly worked the phones while a Miami car-rental operator allegedly worked the laundry. Federal prosecutors say the call was the lock, and the wallets were the room behind it.
A federal indictment unsealed in the Northern District of California alleges three Tennessee men ran a violent home-invasion route through four California cities, targeting cryptocurrency holders and forcing one victim to transfer roughly $6.5 million in digital assets. The case is part of a global pattern security researchers now call wrench attacks.
On April 17, Albanian and Austrian police walked into three call centers in Tirana and pulled the plug on a €50M crypto investment fraud. The room they found is the room every victim was already inside without knowing it.
A Pennsylvania-registered crypto trading shop run out of Miami sold itself as a Binance and BitMEX-tied trading desk earning up to 60% a month. The CFTC says it was a virtual house of cards, and a Florida federal judge made the collapse final.
A cybersecurity firm pulled the back off a Telegram-based scam network and found the same engine running under fifteen different paint jobs. The brands were fake. The dashboards were fake. The "Welcome to FEMITBOT platform" was the only honest line in the whole machine.
A pig-butchering Ponzi run under the names BG Wealth Sharing and DSJ Exchange collected what on-chain investigators estimate may exceed $150 million before the U.S. seized its domain in early May. The withdrawal button had already been turned off.
A coordinated international crackdown announced this week pulled 276 people out of crypto scam compounds and seized $701.9 million in laundered crypto. The arrests do not end the machine. They show you the floor plan.
An international sweep in late April pulled 276 people out of pig butchering scam centers. The script those workers ran is older than crypto. The room they ran it from is what changed.
Jason Burt spent twenty-two years inside the agency that polices the screen you trade on. On May 1, 2026, he walks out the door, and the room he leaves behind is quieter, leaner, and pointed at a smaller list of cases.
On April 18, 2026, a single misconfigured security checkpoint inside a cross-chain crypto bridge gave North Korea's Lazarus Group the opening to drain $290 million from Kelp DAO's liquid restaking protocol. What followed in the next 24 hours was not just a theft. It was a controlled demolition of $292 million in leveraged positions across a market that had no idea the floor had already been removed.
On April 26, 2026, someone found a contract Scallop DeFi had stopped using two years ago and walked through it like a door left open in an empty building. The money was gone in minutes. The auditors had looked at everything except the thing that mattered.