BTC
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Sipping a strong cocktail through a straw, Michael enjoyed the evening lights of Miami. Florida is beautiful after all, he thought, scrolling through the news feed.
He wasn't interested in how the FBI had uncovered a large-scale theft of luxury cars in Texas. Although the news that the Plano police had arrested a group of criminals who had stolen luxury cars was all over the internet. He didn't even care that his car was among the seized vehicles, which included Rolls-Royces, Audis, and Maseratis. He was interested in other information, which said that the US Secret Service had accumulated nearly $400 million in digital assets and that some of the funds were stored in a cold wallet. In addition, this agency also returned funds to victims of crypto scams. One of the largest refunds involved $225 million in USDT, a token pegged to the dollar known as Tether.
"Cryptocurrency fraud has become the leading cause of cybercrime in the United States, with losses of $9.3 billion in 2024. Investigators were able to trace another fraud to the domain name behind a fake investment website. They found out when the resource was registered, by whom and how it was paid for. But the cryptocurrency payment pointed them to another wallet... A brief VPN failure exposed the fraudsters' IP address on the network... Investigators from the agency's Global Investigative Operations Centre (GIOC), which specialises in digital financial crimes, have seized nearly $400 million in various digital assets in recent years alone... The news item went on to give a brief description of how law enforcement officers tracked down the fraudsters using open source tools. I noted to myself that Coinbase and Tether had publicly acknowledged their assistance in recent cases by providing trace analysis and freezing wallets.
No matter how much people talk about ways to protect themselves from crypto fraud, they are still drawn to ‘free cheese.’ They are wasting their time and resources. Even the most expensive cold crypto wallet from the secret service won't save the next victim, Michael thought.
He himself always used two-factor authentication and cold wallets to store large amounts. In addition, Michael very carefully checked sources of information, websites, contracts and crypto exchanges. Even those he had been using for a long time. He had long ago come to the conclusion that if something looks too good to be true, it probably is a scam.
He ordered another cocktail and looked at his laptop screen again. It's time, he thought, and pressed the Enter key. Thus, he directed another victim to a cryptocurrency investment website. This is the third one today, he thought. And the victim was already hooked. The first deposit showed a modest profit. So did the next one. Encouraged, the victim sent more money, even borrowing money to keep up.
Then, without warning, the platform would stop responding and the account balance would disappear. Michael, meanwhile, would ‘go underground’ somewhere in Mexico...
