DOJ Scam Strike Force Has Restrained $938m in Crypto

At a White House roundtable on Wednesday, President Trump said his administration had “frozen nearly $1B of cybercurrency tied to foreign scammers”. The White House did not say where that figure came from, Unchained reports. The nearest official number sits on a Justice Department web page. There, the Scam Center Strike Force says its crypto seizure team “has restrained $938,460,156.82 in crypto currency from these schemes”.

That figure is real but easy to misread. Restrained money has been held back by the authorities. It has not necessarily been returned to the people who lost it. The strike force itself describes repaying victims as its goal: the team “is focused on recovering stolen funds and returning them to victims”. It does not say how much has been paid back so far.

The money comes from Southeast Asian scam compounds

The strike force was set up in late 2025 by the US Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, working with the Justice Department’s Criminal Division, the FBI and the Secret Service. It targets crypto fraud run from scam compounds in Southeast Asia. Its page says investigators are pursuing leaders including “Chinese organized crime affiliates operating in Cambodia, Laos, and Burma”. The office also aims to take down the US internet and social media accounts the scammers use. The page was last updated on 15 October.

The scale of the problem helps explain the attention. In a September release, the office cited FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center figures showing that reported losses from crypto and cyber-enabled investment fraud rose from $4.57bn in 2023 to $8.65bn in 2025, an 89% increase. It added that victims’ reports probably understate the true losses.

Washington’s other numbers come without a source

Trump also claimed the government had prevented at least $1.6bn in losses this year and had “shut down 500+ fraudulent websites”, according to a White House post cited by Unchained. Reuters reported that he said agents had warned “over 10,000 Americans targeted for victimization”, and that FBI Director Kash Patel said the bureau had dismantled 20 scam compounds worldwide. None of those figures came with supporting data. They may overlap with the Justice Department’s restrained total, but neither the White House nor the department has said so.

Attorney General Todd Blanche said the department would no longer leave these cases to individual prosecutors’ offices. “Because of the magnitude of this issue, it demands a nationwide response,” he said, in remarks the department shared and Unchained reported. He described a “newly established cyber-enabled scam initiative”, run by the Criminal Division, that “deploys dozens of prosecutors” across all 94 US Attorneys’ Offices. The push follows Executive Order 14390, signed on 6 March, which told the attorney general to “continue to prioritize prosecutions” of cyber-enabled fraud, including scam centres, Unchained notes. At the roundtable, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller said Trump had “effectively declared cyber warfare against the cyber criminals”. The event came less than two weeks before the 3 November midterm elections.

Britain has signed up to work with the strike force

The effort has a UK side. On 3 September, the strike force signed a memorandum of understanding with the Crown Prosecution Service of England & Wales and the National Crime Agency, according to the Justice Department. The department called the agreement the first of its kind on scam centres. Under it, the agencies will run parallel investigations into shared targets, swap information and decide which country should bring particular cases. At the time, they also planned a joint disruption event with private industry, hosted by the NCA in London, in early October.

For compliance teams, the gap that matters is between restraint and recovery. Holding crypto is the start of a legal process, and the Justice Department’s own wording treats returning funds to victims as work still to be done. The next useful figure from the strike force would be the share of its $938.5m that has actually reached victims.