The U.S. Department of Justice has established a multi‑agency Scam Center Strike Force that integrates Treasury, State, the FBI, Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, and other federal partners to dismantle large‑scale pig butchering networks. Authorities estimate U.S. victim losses near ten billion dollars in 2024 and link industrial‑scale scams to transnational syndicates operating compounds in Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos, and the Philippines. Investigators report that pig butchering combines extended social engineering through messaging apps with staged crypto investing, fake trading dashboards, and operator‑controlled wallets, and that operations use coerced workers and trafficking‑linked infrastructure. Strike Force tactics pair criminal charging strategies with OFAC sanctions, civil forfeiture, asset freezes, rapid evidence collection, and coordinated arrests with foreign partners. Enforcement work uses blockchain analytics—on‑chain clustering, transaction graphing, and tracing through mixers, OTC brokers, and cash‑out points—to link deposits to operators and support indictments and forfeiture complaints. Treasury has designated entities tied to forced‑labor compounds and DOJ cites large bitcoin forfeiture cases as a model for reclaiming proceeds when tracing reaches legal thresholds. Guidance for Web3 teams recommends tightening wallet clustering and pattern analytics, encoding romance‑investment typologies in KYT monitoring, tuning withdrawal risk scoring, expanding sanctions screening, and preparing escalation playbooks that preserve logs, KYC records, device fingerprints, and on‑chain artifacts. Organizations are instructed to establish direct points of contact with federal partners and NGOs that support trafficking victims to assist with coordinated rescues, interviews, and prosecutions. Operational signals to monitor include first‑touch deposits tied to messaging app referrals, staged withdrawals followed by larger deposits, repeated routing through specific OTC brokers, and rapid rotation of domains and wallets. Officials and enforcement filings indicate continued sanctions packages, targeted arrests, faster asset freezes, and increased expectations for virtual asset service providers to proactively detect and report romance‑investment typologies. Source: https://theweb3.news/crypto/us-scam-center-strike-force/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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