Documented social engineering incidents targeting the cryptocurrency & digital assets sector, sourced and fact-checked.
Scheme participants posed as veteran finance professionals inside private WhatsApp investment groups to lure at least 18 U.S. retail investors into a fake crypto trading platform, NanoBit, wiring over $2 million to Hong Kong before the SEC secured a $5.5 million default judgment in one of its first pig-butchering enforcement actions.
ConfirmedA joint FBI-Dubai Police-Chinese MPS-Royal Thai Police operation arrested 276+ people and dismantled 9 pig-butchering scam compounds abroad, while a San Diego federal grand jury indicted alleged Ko Thet Company manager/recruiter Thet Min Nyi ("Pixy") and criminal complaints charged three others tied to the Sanduo Group and Giant Company networks.
ConfirmedA smishing text plus a follow-up phone call using a deepfaked colleague's voice tricked a Retool employee into surrendering MFA codes, letting attackers exploit Google Authenticator cloud sync to take over 27 crypto customer accounts and steal ~$15M.
ConfirmedA US Attorney's Office (EDVA) court order seized seven domains spoofing the Singapore International Monetary Exchange that pig-butchering scammers used to defraud five US victims of over $10 million after grooming them via dating apps, social media, and messaging platforms.
ConfirmedA convincing fake ChatGPT download site, openew[.]app -- reached in part via an AI-generated fake outage page rendered on a real chatgpt.com/s/ URL -- used malvertising and SEO poisoning to push Windows visitors to a credential-stealing loader and Mac visitors to Odyssey Stealer (an AMOS/Atomic Stealer fork) that also swapped in trojanized Ledger and Trezor wallet apps.
ConfirmedThe FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report introduced IC3's first-ever dedicated AI-fraud tracking section in its nearly 25-year history, logging 22,364 complaints and $893,346,472 in losses from scams using voice clones, deepfake video, fake AI-generated social profiles, and forged identification documents.
ConfirmedIn June 2025 the DOJ filed a civil forfeiture complaint against more than $225.3M in Tether (USDT) traced to a global pig-butchering money-laundering network, the largest crypto seizure in U.S. Secret Service history and the biggest tied to crypto confidence scams.
ConfirmedLazarus-linked operators built polished fake job-interview sites impersonating Coinbase, Kraken, Circle and other crypto firms, then used a fabricated camera-driver error to trick applicants into pasting a 'fix' command into their terminal, installing backdoors like GolangGhost and FrostyFerret.
ConfirmedA Taiwan-linked money courier was caught in an Austin bank sting after helping collect part of the $1,408,850 a local victim lost over six months to a "pig butchering" romance-investment scam run through the LINE app and a fake "DAIQ" crypto trading platform.
ConfirmedLazarus operators spear-phished a senior Sky Mavis engineer through a fake LinkedIn recruiting process and a spyware-laced job-offer PDF, then pivoted to the Ronin bridge validator keys and drained roughly $540-625M in crypto.
AllegedBinance CCO Patrick Hillmann claimed scammers built an AI deepfake "hologram" of him from his TV interview footage and used it in live Zoom calls to convince crypto project teams they'd had real Binance token-listing meetings, a claim corroborated only by Hillmann's own account and unnamed secondhand reports, with no independent technical verification or publicly released video/audio evidence of the alleged deepfake.
ConfirmedDOJ alleges Ghanaian twins Jamal and Kamal Abubakari and U.S.-based Amanda Opoku-Boachie ran an AI-video-enabled romance fraud ring that used fictitious female personas to defraud 130+ older Americans of $15 million+ between 2024 and 2026.
ConfirmedAttackers phoned Twitter employees posing as IT help desk, harvested VPN credentials, and used internal admin tools to hijack 130 high-profile accounts for a "double your bitcoin" scam.
Social Engineering Examples