Overview
- Authorities said Monday the week-long operation froze about $12 million in stolen cryptocurrency, which they plan to return to victims.
- Investigators identified more than $45 million in suspected fraud flows tied to approval phishing and mapped over 20,000 compromised wallets across 30 countries.
- Teams reached roughly 3,000 people to warn them of active threats and helped take down more than 120 scam websites used to lure victims.
- Partners included Binance, Coinbase, Tether and analytics firms Elliptics, TRM Labs and Chainalysis, enabling rapid tracing and victim outreach in near real time.
- Approval phishing tricks people into signing wallet permissions that let scammers drain tokens, a tactic tied to pig-butchering schemes that the FBI says fueled $11.3 billion in fraud losses last year and that Chainalysis estimates stole at least $1 billion since 2021.