A Missouri U.S. Attorney’s Office formally indicted an individual on Friday for participating in a large-scale pig butchering scheme that swindled a victim out of millions in digital assets.
According to an official statement released by the prosecutor’s office, 37-year-old Vietnamese national Trung Nguyen Van faces money laundering charges for his part in the operation. Also referred to as romance scams, pig butchering scams establish personal connections with targets before enticing them into deceptive investment opportunities.
Western District of Missouri U.S. Attorney R. Matthew Price noted in a release that pig butchering operations represent a growing and highly complex category of financial fraud responsible for global losses scaling into the billions.
Federal prosecutors stated that across the 2024 summer months, the victim sent roughly $16 million in cryptocurrency under the belief that they were putting money into a digital asset exchange named “Triangle.” Van reportedly moved the assets to private crypto addresses almost immediately after the funds arrived.
Additional individuals may have fallen victim to the operation as well. Authorities mentioned that other victims located inside the United States reported losing millions of dollars and linked their losses to addresses that transmitted funds directly to Van’s cryptocurrency wallet.
The attorney’s office pointed out that while every victim was directed to send digital assets to distinct platforms, their narratives shared a consistent pattern. Under these fraudulent setups, participants were coached by someone they encountered online to put cryptocurrency into a designated web portal while anticipating substantial financial returns.
Originally published at https://www.theblock.co/news/regulation/2026-09-25-man-charged-in-16-million-crypto-massive-pig-butchering-scam-416895.
