Lido Staked Ether (steth) 
The United States has initiated a forfeiture complaint to seize nearly $200,000 worth of USDT held on Binance, linked to a $1.1 million pig-butchering scam. The funds are associated with two scams that defrauded an anonymous victim of over $1 million. Documents filed in the District Court of Columbia provide these details.
According to the documents, the USDT in question is suspected to be proceeds from “wire fraud, wire fraud conspiracy, money laundering, and money laundering conspiracy.”
The Two Scams
The documents describe how an anonymous victim fell prey to two pig-butchering scams, resulting in a loss of approximately $1.1 million between January 2021 and December 2022.
In the first scam, the victim developed a romantic relationship with a scammer named Eva Markus through Facebook. Markus, who had a LinkedIn page, misled the victim by claiming to be an engineering consultant from Boston, Massachusetts, temporarily working on a mining project in Turkey. The victim was deceived into thinking Markus needed funds to hire an attorney to return to America after a supposed mining accident. This led the victim to transfer over $400,000.
In the second scam, the same victim entered into another romantic relationship with someone named Lisa Warren on Facebook. Warren identified herself as a crypto investor and persuaded the victim to invest $55,000 in Bitcoin (BTC). Eventually, the victim was convinced to sell their home and invest the proceeds, resulting in a total of approximately $600,000 in cryptocurrency being sent. After retrieving only $15,000 and conducting some research, the victim realized they had been scammed and reported the incident to the police.
According to the court filing, “In total, [the victim] sent Warren $587,197 worth of cryptocurrency including transaction and exchange fees.”
The FBI traced some of the fraudulent crypto transactions to a Binance account under the name of Izuchukwu Henry Okolo, who converted the BTC to 196,721 USDT. Binance froze the funds and alerted the FBI, which seized them. “The Defendant Property is currently in FBI custody and will be transferred to the United States Marshals Service in the District of Columbia,” according to the document.
Romance and Pig-Butchering Scams
Recently, Americans were advised by the FTC on how to handle situations if someone they are romantically interested in online offers them investment advice. “No one thinks their online love interest is going to scam them, but scammers are good at what they do,” the FTC noted.
Romance scams, often referred to as pig-butchering scams, involve fraudsters befriending victims under the guise of a potential love interest. Ultimately, the victims fall for deceptive cryptocurrency investments, and the perpetrators disappear without a trace.
Pig-butchering scams typically start when bad actors gain the trust of an unsuspecting victim and then ask them to make large investments in seemingly lucrative schemes. After the victim transfers the funds, the fraudsters vanish with the money.
Nithin Kamath, the founder of Zerodha, states that, “As the name implies, a pig butchering scam involves fattening the victim before butchering. Scammers gain the trust of users by using fake profiles. They use the pretense of love and friendship to gain the trust of users and then induce them to send money for jobs and high-return investments and steal the money. These scams are global, and their scope is staggering.”
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