- 12 is charged with cryptocurrency -theft
- The group is reportedly responsible for over $ 263 million theft
- The organization used social engineering tactics to steal the funds
The Ministry of Justice has today revealed that 12 people have been indicted in a Rico case involving theft of over $ 263 million, as well as money laundering, burglary and thread-fraud, the US law office has confirmed.
A mixture of Americans and foreign nationals is accused of “participating in a cyber-activated racketing conspiracy throughout the United States and abroad, equalizing them more than $ 263 million.”
The group, which reportedly met on an online dating platform, had different roles in the organization, such as database hackers, money laundering and burglar who targeted virtual currencies on hardware. The hackers would focus on sites and servers and get cryptocurrency-related databases.
Social Engineering -attack
From there, the organizers and the target identifiers ‘and collected information across the databases to determine the most valuable goals’. The group would have victims of cold calls and use social engineering tactics to convince them that their stories had fallen victim to cyberattacks and that they had to recover or secure their accounts – encourage them to provide credentials.
“According to the indictment, members of the company laundered by the stolen cryptocurrency revenue by moving the funds through various mixers and exchanges using” peels “, confirmed review of wallets and virtual private networks to mask their true identity,” the Department of Justice confirmed.
In just the first three months of 2025, over 1.5 billion dollars crypto was lost to theft or scam, with an over 300% increase in money lost in Q1. Mediantab per Event was $ 9,549,339, and only 0.4% of stolen funds were returned to victims, confirms research from certificate.
Much of this was thanks to a major incident where hackers sealed over $ 1 billion in one of the biggest cryptotfts ever, against cryptocurrency -exchange platform Bybit – measuring as the greatest heist in crypto history.
