Eighty-one accounts were used to launder funds, including Bitcoin, USDT, USDC, and ETH
The United States government has brought a civil action to obtain a forfeiture order of 7.1 million in cryptocurrency allegedly associated with a broad-based oil and gas investment fraud, the U.S. Attorney’s Office said in a press release. The scheme that ran between June 2022 and July 2024 is accused of swindling investors by claiming to generate profits by renting oil tanks that were not there. The scheme instead used a roundabout method to transfer about 97 million dollars to dozens of accounts before converting huge amounts into cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Tether, USD Coin, and Ether.
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The Justice Department exposed that the stolen money was transferred via a complex system of 81 bank and crypto accounts to hide the source of the money. A name that comes up is that of Geoffrey Auyeung, who was indicted in August 2024 on allegations of money laundering and who got a big cut of the illicit revenues. According to the prosecutors, Auyeung spent the money on buying different digital currencies, which were later sold by transferring massive sums to crypto exchange Binance. After Auyeung was taken into custody, the Department of Homeland Security emptied his bank accounts of more than two million dollars(2.3M).
The government followed the crypto transactions belonging to people who live in Russia and Nigeria, and, according to the information, they used stolen funds to purchase cryptocurrency and transferred part of it to exchanges in their countries. Noting that the conspirators sought to use these cryptocurrency accounts to launder their money, Acting U.S. Attorney Teal Luthy said that recovery attempts could begin once federal investigators intervened quickly.
So far, prosecutors have found victims who were defrauded collectively of 17.9 million dollars, but this number is expected to grow. In case of the forfeiture grant by the court, the total recovered by the U.S. authorities would increase to 9.4 million dollars to pay the victim.
The case is among a wide-scale regulatory crackdown on cryptocurrency fraud. In previous news, earlier this month, July 2025, two men were charged as executives of OmegaPro, a so-called crypto Ponzi scheme that defrauded investors of $650 million. Another ex-athlete was separately fined for running a $900,000 Ponzi scheme to mine cryptocurrency.
The U.S. Department of Justice is still using blockchain analytics and other conventional investigation methods to break down transnational frauds hiding under the cover of digital assets. This example indicates that there is an increasing enforcement zeal to reclaim stolen cryptocurrency and protect the interests of investors in the face of ever more complex schemes.
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