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The United States Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of North Carolina announced that they have seized $5 million worth of Tether (USDT) from crypto addresses that allegedly stole these funds from victims through a “pig butchering” scam.

US Attorney Michael Easley said that the US will ensure that “every dollar” lost through crypto scams will be recovered even though the criminals are located in another country. Easley also promised that the funds recovered from the criminals will be returned to the victims. 

Pig butchering is a crypto scam where the scammer establishes a relationship with the victim often through online social channels. Once the scammer has built trust with the victim, they persuade them to invest in fraudulent crypto schemes or malicious crypto exchanges with the promise of generating high income. 

When the victims tried to withdraw funds after falling for the trap, the scammers claimed that they needed to pay taxes or penalties to release their funds. This is just another method that the scammers try to drain more funds from the victims.

According to the press release published on Aug. 22, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) worked with Tether to track the victim funds and finally was able to recover them. Upon further investigations, the FBI found out that the victims' cryptocurrencies were allegedly used to fund other scams and money laundering schemes.

The pig butchering scam has increased the number of losses over the years. In the FBI Internet Crime Report 2022, around 800,000 complaints were received, claiming they had lost $10.3 billion. The report revealed that more than 19,000 victims had fallen for romance-related type cybercrime, resulting in a $735,882,192 loss. 

Finally, the FBI promised that they would continuously adapt to protect the users against new “cyber-enabled fraud schemes.”