- The U.S. Secret Service has seized nearly $400 million in digital assets over the past decade.
- Much of these assets are stored in one of the world’s largest crypto cold wallets.
- The agency’s investigations have targeted scams involving fake investment platforms, romance scams, and sextortion.
- Over $9.3 billion was lost to crypto-related scams by Americans in 2024, accounting for more than half of total internet crime losses that year.
- Recovering stolen crypto often relies on assistance from industry players like Coinbase and Tether.
The U.S. Secret Service has confiscated nearly $400 million in digital currencies in the last ten years, according to people familiar with the agency’s operations. Many of these seized assets are held in a single, secure cold-storage wallet, as reported by Bloomberg.
The seizures are the result of multiple investigations conducted by the agency’s Global Investigative Operations Center (GIOC), using open-source tools and blockchain tracking. According to Jamie Lam, an investigative analyst for the U.S. Secret Service, these efforts focused on scams that use convincing online platforms to lure victims and then vanish with their money.
“That’s how they do it. They’ll send you a photo of a really good-looking guy or girl. But it’s probably some old guy in Russia,” Lam said, during a law enforcement briefing in Bermuda last month. The team often identifies criminals through domain records, blockchain transactions, and errors in their use of VPNs, which can reveal real locations.
Kali Smith leads the agency’s crypto strategy, training officials in more than 60 countries to detect financial crimes online. The agency often focuses on areas with weak financial oversight or programs that sell residency to foreign nationals. According to Smith, “Sometimes after just a week-long training, they can be like, ‘Wow, we didn’t even realize that this is occurring in our country.’”
Cases include romance-investment fraud and sextortion schemes. In one sextortion case, investigators traced money sent by an Idaho teenager to someone using a Nigerian passport. British police later arrested the suspect in England.
Crypto-related scams were the largest category of U.S. internet crime losses in 2024. Americans reported $9.3 billion lost to crypto fraud that year, out of a total $16.6 billion in internet crime losses, according to the FBI. In the first half of 2025, digital asset losses from scams and hacks reached $2.47 billion, a slight increase over the previous year.
Successful crypto recovery often depends on cooperation from major platforms. Coinbase and Tether have provided transaction data and frozen wallets to aid investigations. A major case involved the recovery of $225 million in USD Tether (USDT) connected to romance scams.
For more details, see the original Bloomberg report. Updates from the U.S. Secret Service are available on their official X account.
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