Brooklyn prosecutors alongside the FBI successfully seized or disabled 241 fraudulent websites and 112 servers connected to a digital asset investment scheme that reportedly defrauded Russian-speaking individuals in the United States out of tens of millions of dollars.
This enforcement action, executed last week, followed a three-year probe into a criminal network that utilized internet infrastructure and IP addresses located in Ukraine alongside other Eastern European nations, as explained by Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez. No arrests have been disclosed yet.
The fraudsters attracted targets using Russian-language advertisements on Facebook that pitched lucrative investment prospects. Bogus consultants then contacted the targets by phone, guiding them to purchase cryptocurrency and transfer the funds to deceptive exchange portals.
Whenever users attempted to cash out their balances, the portals froze their profiles or demanded additional payments for fabricated taxes and fees.
Subsequently, the perpetrators attempted a secondary exploitation by offering deceptive recovery services to retrieve the lost funds, according to Gonzalez. Extracted information indicated they reached out to victims a short time after the original scam, pretending they could get the stolen capital back.
The District Attorney’s Virtual Currency Unit had previously taken down or disrupted 400 domains associated with digital asset investment schemes, though new websites continuously popped up.
On this occasion, law enforcement focused directly on the servers—managed by providers in Eastern Europe and the United States—that stored target information and the backend software operating the scam. The main objective was to prevent the criminals from swiftly deploying replacement sites.
This case arrives during a period when cryptocurrency investment scams represented roughly 84% of the $8.65 billion in total investment-fraud damages submitted to the FBI throughout 2025, based on the agency’s official yearly report.
Across every cybercrime sector, digital asset-related damages reached $11.37 billion, representing nearly 54% of the overall $20.88 billion aggregate. Both figures are derived from official FBI data.
Authorities in Brooklyn have secured approximately $300,000 thus far and are pursuing additional asset recovery. Officials noted that certain individuals lost their complete life savings.
Originally published at https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/10/15/how-brooklyn-prosecutors-and-the-fbi-took-down-a-massive-crypto-fraud-network-targeting-russian-speakers.
