victim

According to on-chain analyst ZachXBT, a counterfeit Ledger Live application was launched on the Apple App Store, resulting in over 50 users' assets being stolen, with total losses amounting to approximately $9.5 million, involving various assets such as Bitcoin, EVM chain assets, TRON, Solana, and XRP.The stolen funds were subsequently transferred through more than 150 KuCoin deposit addresses and laundered using a centralized mixing service called AudiA6. Data shows that the largest single loss reached $3.23 million. The application has recently been removed by Apple.

The U.S. Department of Justice has announced that it has initiated a compensation program for victims of the OneCoin cryptocurrency fraud case, with over $40 million in forfeited assets available for payout.The program is aimed at investors who purchased OneCoin and incurred net losses between 2014 and 2019. U.S. prosecutors stated that this move is intended to return some of the illicit proceeds to the victims. OneCoin was initiated by Ruja Ignatova and Karl Greenwood, with the related fraud exceeding $4 billion. Ignatova has been missing since 2017, and Greenwood was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 2023.

According to on-chain analyst Yu Jin (@EmberCN), a Kraken user is suspected of falling victim to a social engineering attack, resulting in the theft of 8,662 ETH, worth approximately $18.19 million. The attacker then exchanged 878 ETH for 26.5 BTC using the cross-chain tool THORChain, and six hours later transferred all stolen assets (7,784 ETH + 26.5 BTC) to the HitBTC exchange.

According to ZachXBT, an unidentified Kraken user is suspected of losing approximately $18.2 million due to a social engineering scam.The address involved started transferring funds from Ethereum to Bitcoin through the SafePal wallet and THORChain about 45 minutes ago.

According to reports from the newspaper, a 39-year-old woman from Hong Kong met a man who claimed to be an employee of a new energy company through a mobile dating app, and then they moved to WhatsApp to develop an online romantic relationship. The other party lured the victim into investing in cryptocurrency on a fake trading platform under the pretext of high returns. Following the platform's customer service instructions, the victim transferred over 5.5 million Hong Kong dollars to multiple unknown individuals through various fast transfer accounts over approximately two months, after which the scammer went offline, and the victim realized they had been scammed.Last week, the Hong Kong police received a total of 15 reports of online romance scams, involving nearly 10 million Hong Kong dollars in fraud. The police remind that such scams often use investments in precious metals and cryptocurrencies as bait.

According to the Financial Times, victims of investment fraud in China are challenging a compensation arrangement involving approximately 61,000 bitcoins in a UK court. Representatives of the victims have filed an application with the High Court of England, seeking to overturn the proposal for compensation through the Chinese compensation mechanism, arguing that this plan may allow UK authorities to retain significant asset appreciation gains.These bitcoins were seized by the UK police during a money laundering investigation in London and are currently valued at around £3.2 billion (approximately $4.3 billion). It is reported that the law firm Candey represents about 5,700 victims in opposition, claiming that the current compensation scheme fails to ensure fair compensation.The fraud case is led by Qian Zhimin and involves over 128,000 Chinese investors, with the proceeds of the fraud converted into bitcoins and transferred overseas between 2014 and 2017. The UK prosecution has stated that some claims may result in a few victims and litigation funders receiving compensation exceeding their actual losses.

A resident of Nanaimo, Canada, fell victim to a scam after receiving a text message promoting remote stock trading jobs and depositing about CAD 5,000 (approximately USD 3,600) through a cryptocurrency ATM at the end of last year. Earlier this year, the victim saw a message online disguised as an RCMP announcement encouraging fraud victims to report their cases.After submitting a form, a person claiming to be a lawyer called, stating that they had found two cryptocurrency accounts related to the victim and could help recover about USD 60,000 in so-called profits. Gary O'Brien, a media relations officer with the Nanaimo RCMP, stated that the RCMP does not contact individuals regarding discovered cryptocurrency accounts, does not collaborate with private companies to recover lost funds, and does not request any form of payment to investigate fraud.Andy Zhou, co-founder and CEO of blockchain security company BlockSec, stated that such tactics are known as "false recovery service scams" and have systematic characteristics. Scammers often possess victim information collected from the original scam, and organized fraud rings circulate lists of previously remitted victims, making these individuals targets for secondary scams.The effectiveness of impersonating law enforcement brands lies in exploiting the psychological mechanism of "authority bias." Canadian police have been conducting cryptocurrency investigation training since 2022.

The founder of 360 Group, Zhou Hongyi, stated in an interview with the Global Times that the United States, under the banner of "protecting the rights of victims," has directly transformed the virtual currency assets involved in the case into strategic financial reserves under its control, completing a magnificent and legitimate transfer from the end of the criminal chain to national assets.This unilateral harvesting behavior by the U.S. not only undermines the law enforcement activities of other countries, leading to secondary losses for victims, but also disrupts the global flow of virtual currency assets, destabilizing the financial stability of emerging market countries. The ultimate goal is to consolidate the dominance of the U.S. dollar in the digital financial sector.

The Blue Sky Ge Rui case will hold a hearing on "Legal Application Issues" in July. Chinese victims who intend to pursue the UK recovery process need to supplement detailed financial information after completing the preliminary registration, including total investment, amount of loss, and the amount of compensation received along with evidence, by June 18, 2026.It is reported that this hearing will be crucial for the disposal of 60,000 bitcoins. If Chinese law applies, there is a creditor-debtor relationship between the victims and Blue Sky Ge Rui, and the victims can only recover the principal at most; if UK law applies, victims have proprietary rights to the bitcoins, and the appreciated portion of the loss may also be recoverable.

According to The Block, Australian police have charged a 42-year-old man with operating a cryptocurrency investment scam that defrauded over 190 elderly and vulnerable individuals of a total of 5 million AUD (approximately 35 million USD). The man has been granted conditional bail and is set to appear in Burwood Local Court on March 17.According to a police statement, the cybercrime unit Strike Force Resaca executed search warrants in Strathfield and Cammeray on Friday morning, seizing electronic devices and documents related to the case. At the Strathfield residence, police arrested the 42-year-old suspect and charged him with "dealing with the proceeds of crime," involving money laundering through an online platform. A second man, aged 36, was arrested in Cammeray and has been released pending further investigation.The investigation revealed that since November 2025, victims were contacted via social media by individuals claiming to be investment advisors, who guided them to deposit funds into a digital currency trading platform called "NEXOpayment." Victims believed they were purchasing cryptocurrencies, stocks, or other legitimate investment products, but the funds were actually transferred multiple times into different crypto wallets and exchanges, displaying a typical money laundering pattern.

According to Cointelegraph citing @web3_antvirus, an address poisoning scam resulted in a victim losing $599,000 USDT. The victim sent funds to a fake address copied from transaction records. The attacker embedded the fake address through a small transfer, mixing it with legitimate transaction records. The victim then copied the address and sent funds to the attacker.

8300 Chinese victims apply for compensation in the case of 60,000 bitcoins related to Qian Zhimin's money laundering, where asset disposal has reached a deadlock, with multiple law firms representing and fighting for themselves. According to the UK judge, there are issues of repeated submissions, repeated debates, and prolonged procedures, and the lawyer fees are also rising, ultimately needing to be paid by the Chinese victims.It is reported that on the eve of the Lunar New Year and the first day of the New Year (February 16 and 17, 2026), the High Court of England will hold a hearing involving over 30 billion yuan, concerning nearly 130,000 Chinese victims. This is the asset disposal procedure for the highly publicized 60,000 bitcoins money laundering case. In addition, the price of bitcoin is highly volatile, and the market value of 60,000 bitcoins has shrunk from a peak of approximately 54 billion yuan on October 6, 2025, to about 31 billion yuan in early February 2026.

According to Scam Sniffer monitoring, in January, a single victim lost $12.2 million due to copying an incorrect address in their transaction history. Combined with a similar attack in December that resulted in a loss of 500,000 dollars, the two victims have accumulated losses exceeding $62 million.Address poisoning attacks refer to attackers sending small amounts of tokens from visually similar addresses to lure users into copying the incorrect address. Additionally, in January, signature phishing scams stole $6.27 million, representing a 207% increase month-over-month. Analysts believe that the Ethereum Fusaka upgrade has reduced transaction costs, leading to an increase in the frequency of such attacks.Coin Metrics data shows that dust transactions related to stablecoins currently account for about 11% of the total daily transactions on Ethereum. Whitestream indicates that DAI has become the preferred choice for illegal operators to store funds due to the protocol's governance not cooperating with authorities to freeze addresses.

This week, the High Court of England held a hearing in Manchester regarding the civil recovery case of Qian Zhimin's Bitcoin. However, this was a typical procedural hearing and did not make any rulings on asset ownership, compensation schemes, or substantive legal issues. The core issue of the hearing was who would represent the large number of Chinese victims. Judge Turner expressed concerns about the current situation multiple times, as more and more law firms are representing different groups of Chinese victims and making claims under Section 281 of the POCA. The High Court is facing the real risk of "agent proliferation." Additionally, Judge Turner also mentioned another judicial process being concurrently advanced by the High Court, concerning the UK bankruptcy liquidation process of Blue Sky Grey. It is reported that a subsequent hearing is scheduled for February 16-17, during which further arrangements or guidance may be provided regarding the specific impact of the bankruptcy liquidation process on the civil recovery case.

The annual report for 2025 published by Scam Sniffer shows that losses from cryptocurrency phishing attacks have significantly decreased, dropping 83% from $494 million in 2024 to $83.85 million, with the number of victims also declining by 68% to 106,106.In terms of types, Permit signatures remain the most common type; malicious signatures of EIP-7702 emerged after the Pectra system upgrade, with two major incidents occurring in August. Phishing losses are closely related to market activity, with the probability of occurrence positively correlated with user activity. The Ethereum price saw the strongest increase in the third quarter, while phishing losses were also the highest ($31 million). When the market is active, overall user activity increases, leading to a higher proportion of affected users.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, two American men have pleaded guilty to attacking multiple targets in the U.S. using ALPHV BlackCat ransomware.Ryan Goldberg (40) from Georgia and Kevin Martin (36) from Texas admitted to deploying ALPHV BlackCat ransomware between April and December 2023. Both are professionals in the cybersecurity industry, and they, along with another accomplice, paid 20% of the ransom as a cut to the ALPHV BlackCat administrator to gain access to the ransomware. After successfully extorting approximately $1.2 million in Bitcoin from one victim, the three split 80% of the ransom and laundered it through various means.The two defendants are scheduled to be sentenced on March 12, 2026, and could face up to 20 years in prison.

According to Macao Radio, a local woman in Macao was induced by netizens to invest in virtual currency. Starting from mid-September, she transferred money to a designated account in 8 installments. The platform had previously shown "paper profits of 7.9 million yuan," but when she attempted to withdraw, she was asked to pay a "currency exchange difference" of 250,000 yuan first. After that, she lost contact with the platform and ultimately confirmed that she had been scammed out of 1.18 million yuan.

On-chain detective ZachXBT revealed in a post on X that an account impersonating a Trust Wallet vulnerability victim is actually a scammer. This account has changed its username over 44 times, participated in multiple meme coin scams, has a very low post volume, and has preemptively blocked its own profile, intending to gain attention and interaction from the incident. Users are reminded to be cautious of false victim narratives.

According to on-chain researcher Specter, the address that lost 50 million USDT due to phishing has left a message on-chain to the attackers, stating that a formal case has been filed. With the assistance of law enforcement agencies, cybersecurity organizations, and multiple blockchain protocols, a large amount of actionable intelligence regarding the attackers' activities has been collected.The wallet address controlled by the attackers is now under 24/7 surveillance. The attackers are required to return 98% of the stolen assets to a designated address within 48 hours; if they do so, they may keep $1 million as a white hat bounty for discovering and disclosing the vulnerability. However, this proposal is contingent upon the attackers' full and timely cooperation.Once the funds are returned, the victims will consider the matter resolved and will not take further action. If they refuse to cooperate, the case will be escalated through legal and international law enforcement channels to identify the attackers and pursue criminal and civil liability.

Scam Sniffer posted on platform X that a victim lost approximately 50 million dollars due to copying an incorrect address from contaminated transfer records.