The US Secret Service has built one of the world’s largest seized crypto war chests, confiscating nearly $400 million in digital assets.
Much of the crypto haul now sits in a single cold-storage wallet, making the Secret Service an unlikely heavyweight among the world’s largest crypto custodians, according to a report from Bloomberg.
“That’s how they do it,” said Jamie Lam, an investigative analyst with the Secret Service, during a recent training session in Bermuda. “They’ll send you a photo of a really good-looking guy or girl. But it’s probably some old guy in Russia.”
The sites often show early profits to coax larger deposits, only to disappear without a trace.
These investigations have helped the agency claw back millions and highlight how crypto’s promise of anonymity can also be its Achilles’ heel for criminals. “Sometimes after just a week-long training, they can be like, ‘Wow, we didn’t even realize this was happening here,’” Smith said.
Using tools like domain records, blockchain analysis, and occasionally catching a scammer’s VPN slip-up, Lam’s team has traced illicit funds across borders.
To recover stolen funds, the Secret Service has worked with firms like Coinbase and Tether, which have helped trace and freeze assets. In one case, the agency reclaimed $225 million in USDT tied to romance-investment scams.
Analysts tracked the funds through nearly 6,000 transactions to an account linked to a Nigerian passport. British police arrested the suspect upon arrival in Guildford, England.
Wallet breaches alone caused $1.7 billion in losses across just 34 incidents, while phishing scams accounted for over $410 million across 132 attacks. Two major incidents, including Bybit’s $1.5 billion hack in February and Cetus Protocol’s $225 million exploit in May, skewed the year’s losses upward, together accounting for nearly $1.78 billion.
Crypto investors lost over $2.2 billion to hacks, scams, and breaches in the first half of 2025, driven largely by wallet compromises and phishing attacks, according to CertiK’s latest security report.
Ethereum remained the primary target, suffering over $1.6 billion in losses across 175 events.
The report also pointed to rising sophistication of phishing schemes and ongoing risks from social engineering, urging crypto users to verify links, avoid suspicious sites, and use hardware wallets.
Without these, losses align more closely with previous years at around $690 million.
