In brief
- The United States Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts filed a civil forfeiture action to claw back roughly $200,000 in USDT linked to an online investment fraud scheme.
- It traced part of a Massachusetts resident’s losses from a suspected fake trading platform to a crypto account seized in June 2025.
- Recoveries for scams remain rare.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Massachusetts filed a civil forfeiture action Monday seeking to recover just over $200,000 in the USDT stablecoin that prosecutors said were proceeds of an online cryptocurrency investment fraud.
The tokens were traced to a scheme that targeted a Massachusetts resident who was scammed by a Tinder match who offered a purported crypto trading opportunity, according to court filings.
Crypto-related crime jumped 162% in 2025, according to Chainalysis, with illicit addresses receiving at least $154 billion—fueled largely by a spike in flows to sanctioned entities.
Among that figure, “pig-butchering” scams—a blend of romance, social engineering and investment fraud—rely on long-running manipulation tactics in which scammers build trust online, pressure victims to send money to what appear to be legitimate trading platforms, and then extract additional payments until the victim realizes the profits are fake and the funds are gone.
Unpacking “pig-butchering” scams
The Massachusetts scheme follows this familiar script. The victim matched on Tinder with someone using the name “Nino Martin,” who quickly suggested moving the conversation to WhatsApp, a common shift scammers use to get victims off moderated platforms and into more private chats. “Martin” allegedly claimed to be a financial advisor and offered to help the victim make money trading cryptocurrency.
Following instructions, the victim created an account and began transferring funds to a trading site that law enforcement believed was fraudulent. After the victim’s transfers from a legitimate account were flagged as suspicious, people tied to the suspected fraudulent platform allegedly contacted the victim with instructions designed to evade restrictions.
By the time the victim contacted law enforcement, prosecutors said, they had transferred about $504,353 to the suspected fraudulent platform.
Investigators later traced some of the funds to a cryptocurrency account that was seized in June 2025. The government said the seized USDT represented part of the victim’s losses.
Transnational crypto crime
Pig butchering schemes have increasingly been linked to organized crime operations, particularly in parts of Southeast Asia. U.S. and other authorities have taken steps over the past year to target the infrastructure behind the scams, including financial intermediaries and money-laundering networks connected to them.
Those efforts include the sanctioning of money laundering marketplace Huione in Cambodia and the arrest of Prince Holdings Group head Chen Zhi, who has links to regional scam activities. Chinese authorities have also apprehended the heads of criminal families linked to scam and gambling compounds in Myanmar, as well as other crimes, sentencing several to death and others to long periods of incarceration.
But even when funds are identified, recovery is often difficult. Alex Katz, CEO & Co-Founder of Kerberus, told Decrypt most victims have little chance of getting their money back, particularly when funds are quickly moved across blockchains or converted into widely used cryptocurrencies.
“If the funds are converted into stablecoins, it may be possible to attempt a freeze with the help of issuers like Tether or Circle, but this process is very difficult and, in many cases, close to impossible,” he said.
“If the funds are sent to a centralized exchange, recovery may be possible—but only if the exchange is notified quickly, which usually requires police cooperation,” he added, noting that, “In many countries, that level of cooperation is nearly impossible to obtain.”
Katz said law enforcement response remained uneven across countries, with many agencies lacking established procedures for handling cryptocurrency fraud cases, or declining to take cases that don’t involve substantial sums.. As a result, he said, pig-butchering scams and recovery efforts have seen little meaningful improvement.
“It remains extremely difficult to get law enforcement to cooperate, and in some countries it’s almost impossible. In many cases, there simply aren’t enough reports for authorities to have proper protocols in place,” he said.
“As a result, when incidents occur, they often don’t know how to handle them, aren’t sure whether the issue is even real, and don’t prioritize these cases.”
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