Two hundred and forty-one websites and 112 servers. That is what the Brooklyn District Attorney and the FBI say they shut down in a crypto investment fraud network, in an operation carried out last week and announced on 14 October.
The servers were hosted by companies in Eastern Europe and the United States. Investigators traced the infrastructure to Ukraine and elsewhere in Eastern Europe, and executed search warrants across three time zones.
The case began three years ago, when Russian-speaking victims in Brooklyn told prosecutors they had answered Russian-language Facebook ads offering investments. Officials say the scheme took tens of millions of dollars from Americans, mainly Russian speakers.
District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said the operators did not stop at the first loss. Having taken large sums through the fake platform, they then tried to lure the same victims with offers to recover their money.
The investigation was led by the DA’s Virtual Currency Unit and the FBI’s New York office. Prosecutors said seizing the servers cut off access to victim records, website data and the software the operation ran on.
That is a real disruption, but servers are the cheapest part of a scam to replace. One report noted that new sites appeared quickly after earlier takedowns.
No arrests were reported, and the office has not given a figure for money recovered. Until someone is charged, this is a clean-up of the infrastructure rather than a case against the people behind it, and the victims’ money is still gone.
