The Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office, working with the FBI, said it seized and disabled 241 crypto investment scam domains and 112 servers tied to a transnational fraud ring that allegedly targeted Russian-speaking communities in the United States. Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced the action on Oct. 14 Eastern Time, saying the office’s Virtual Currency Unit (VCU) led what prosecutors described as one of the largest cyber disruption operations ever carried out by a local district attorney’s office.
Prosecutors said the operation went beyond taking down websites. It also cut off backend infrastructure used by the group, making it harder for operators to quickly launch new sites and reconnect with past victims.
Three-year investigation traced a pattern of Russian-language targeting
According to prosecutors, the VCU spent the past three years investigating the organization. Because Brooklyn has a large Russian-speaking population, the share of victims there was notably higher than in other parts of the country.
Investigators said they began to see highly similar victim accounts. People first clicked on Russian-language investment ads on Facebook, then received calls in Russian from people claiming to be investment advisers. The callers walked victims through opening accounts on fake crypto investment platforms, buying cryptocurrency, and sending it to wallet addresses designated by the platforms.
After keeping money on the platforms for weeks or months, victims who tried to withdraw funds often found their accounts locked or were told they had to pay extra fees and taxes first.
According to The Record, some of the seized websites were designed to look like legitimate investment platforms and invoked the names of U.S. government agencies or wealthy public figures such as Elon Musk to gain credibility.
Authorities said the network also ran recovery scams
Prosecutors said server data showed the group also carried out recovery scams. Weeks after the initial fraud, operators would contact victims again and claim they could help recover stolen assets, only to defraud them a second time.
Search warrants were executed across three time zones
The district attorney’s office said the fraud ring relied on internet infrastructure and IP addresses located in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries. Last week, the VCU executed multiple search warrants within hours across three time zones. In addition to the 241 domains, authorities said they took control of more than 100 cloud servers hosted by providers in Eastern Europe and the United States.
Those servers contained website data, victim information, and operational software, according to prosecutors.
The office said the VCU had already seized or disrupted about 400 crypto investment scam domains before this operation. New sites kept appearing quickly, which led investigators to shift their focus to the server layer.
Losses were estimated in the tens of millions of dollars
Prosecutors said the fraud caused losses estimated at tens of millions of dollars, with some victims losing their life savings. Only about $300,000 in illicit proceeds has been recovered so far, and efforts to recover more are continuing.
According to CoinDesk, no arrests have been announced in the case.
Brooklyn prosecutors had taken similar action before
This was not the first such action by the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office. In April 2024, the office seized 21 pig-butchering domains, including coinformat.com, and three virtual servers. In September this year, a Brooklyn man prosecuted by the VCU for impersonating Coinbase customer support and stealing about $16 million was sentenced to up to 12 years in prison.
FBI figures show crypto investment fraud remained the largest source of financial losses
According to the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center’s 2025 annual report, crypto investment scams were the largest category of financial loss for Americans in 2025, with reported losses of $7.2 billion. The report said many of these scams were run by criminal groups in Southeast Asia that forced trafficking victims to work in scam compounds, a model widely known as pig butchering.
The IC3 report also said victims were often targeted again through recovery scams. In a separate FBI news release, the bureau said there were 181,565 cryptocurrency-related complaints in 2025, with losses exceeding $11 billion.