The United States government has filed a civil forfeiture complaint to seize over $7.5 million in illicit crypto assets belonging to scammers based in Nigeria and Russia in a transnational, massive fraud scheme that stole over $97.1 million from Americans.
According to legal documents sighted by Peoples Gazette, the scammers defrauded their victims by tricking them into sending money to several ‘False Escrow Entities’, with the promise that the funds would be invested into the oil and gas industry, including reserving oil tank storage in Rotterdam, Netherlands, or in Houston, Texas.
Instead, the perpetrators would immediately cut all communications with their victims upon receiving money from them, which is distributed across different cryptocurrency accounts controlled by the scammers in the scheme that the government alleged spanned from June 2022 to approximately July 2024, according to court documents.
Following several months of investigation into the case, in December 2024, the Department of Homeland Security seized at least eight cryptocurrency accounts controlled by the fraudsters with over $7.5 million worth of assets, which the U.S. government is requesting the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington at Seattle to declare its final forfeiture.
The assets include a Binance account with an estimated 440,5978 USDT, a second one with approximately 19 BTC, a third with over 39 ETH, and a fourth account containing more than 156 TRX. Over 84 million pieces of LUNC were found in a fifth wallet, and approximately 5.5 YFI was in the sixth one, legal filings showed.
Over 129,601 pieces of POL were found in another wallet account, while the last account held 288,883 worth of ADA. All eight accounts were trading as Nest Services Limited on the Binance platform.
The Homeland Security said no fewer than 81 accounts at 24 financial institutions and at least 19 accounts at eight cryptocurrency exchanges were opened in the names of the False Escrow Entities, which the individuals who owned and controlled those entities used to receive and launder over $97.1 million fraud proceeds through domestic and international wire transfers between 2022 and 2024.
Court documents noted that further investigations revealed the IP address and know-your-customer information of the Binance accounts used to receive and reroute the stolen funds were traced by individuals in Nigeria and Russia. None of the accounts appeared to be registered to individuals or entities associated with the oil and gas industry.
The fake companies established by the scammers to perpetrate the scam include Sea Forest International, Apex Oil and Gas Trading, Navigator Energy Logistics, Terminal Energy International Escrow Service, Energo Horizons Logistics, Legacy Energy Logistics Transport Group, and Green Tree Gateway.
