In only three months, our Scam Center Strike Force has made significant progress, freezing, seizing, and forfeiting cryptocurrency from these criminals.
Pirro said that crypto seizures are “one important part of the Scam Center Strike Force’s work,” adding that, “Through the legal process, my Office will seek to forfeit these funds and return them to victims to the maximum extent possible.”
The Scam Center Strike ForceDeddy Lavid, CEO of blockchain analytics platform Cyvers, told Decrypt that while the $580 million in seizures announced Thursday is “certainly operationally meaningful,” in the wider context of global crypto fraud, it represents “only a fraction of the total activity we’re observing.”
In Thursday’s announcement, Pirro linked Southeast Asian scam networks to “Chinese organized crime,” operating through transnational criminal organizations.
According to Lavid, the picture is more nuanced; while a “meaningful share” of Southeast Asian scam infrastructure shows “operational, linguistic, financial, or routing ties” to Chinese TCOs, the networks involved are “increasingly decentralized and hybrid in nature.”
These hybrid networks, he added, frequently involve local operators, regional facilitators and cross-border laundering hubs, with “core orchestration layers” built atop Chinese-language infrastructure and financial routing patterns, linked to regional execution hubs in locations such as Cambodia, Myanmar and Laos and “distributed laundering and cash-out layers across multiple jurisdictions.”
The result, he said, is that Chinese TCOs “appear to play a central coordination role” in an increasingly “multinational and operationally fragmented” criminal ecosystem.
