- Scammers allegedly stole $2.2 million in crypto from people seeking remote jobs.
- The crypto has been frozen and is ready to be returned to victims.
- The New York Attorney General wants to serve the alleged scammers via NFT.
New York Attorney General Letitia James is suing scammers who allegedly stole crypto worth $2.2 million.
She doesn’t know who they are— but it doesn’t matter. She’ll tell them with a non-fungible token.
James’ office intends to serve the unidentified scammers by dropping an NFT into their crypto wallets, the office said Thursday. The NFT will contain a link to a website with documents detailing the lawsuit.
It will be the first time a regulator has served an alleged criminal using NFT, the office said.
For all their revolutionary potential, blockchains are, at their heart, nothing more than tamper-proof, public ledgers. While prosecutors have yet to identify the alleged scammers, they do know the addresses of their crypto wallets.
It isn’t the first time that lawyers have had to get creative in the shadowy world of crypto, which prizes anonymity. Bitcoin is now a trillion-dollar asset, and yet people are still debating the identity of its pseudonymous creator, Satoshi Nakamoto.
Last year, lawyers in a class-action lawsuit against DeFi giant Lido DAO served the ostensibly leaderless digital cooperative by posting the litigation on the Lido DAO governance forum, where members debate changes to the Lido protocol.
It is unclear when the New York Attorney General will serve the alleged scammers. The office did not immediately respond to a DL News inquiry on Friday.
According to the complaint, scammers offering fake work-from-home job opportunities convinced their victims to buy stablecoins and send them to the scammers’ crypto wallets.
“Scammers sent text messages to New Yorkers promising them good-paying, flexible jobs only to trick them into purchasing cryptocurrency and then stealing it from them,” James said in a statement.
From January to June 2024, the alleged scammers would send unsolicited messages and often posed as recruiters working on behalf of real companies, according to the attorney general’s office.
Victims who responded were told to continue the conversation through WhatsApp, where they were told they could make money by posting product reviews on companies’ websites.
“Trainers” explained that posting the reviews — for products priced in Tether — required the victims to maintain a “working account balance equal to or greater than the ‘price’ assigned to the product,” according to the lawsuit.
The victims were told they could receive crypto for reviewing the products and hitting certain milestones. But the pay they were earning was fake, while the account balances they were required to maintain “simply went into wallets that Defendants owned and/or controlled.”
One victim, a naturalized US citizen from Croatia referred to only as “Ally,” lost more than $100,000 in the scam, according to the lawsuit. Another, 38-year-old tech salesperson and Florida resident “Dena,” lost more than $300,000.
Victims’ crypto was transferred to three wallets containing almost $2.2 million in USDC and Tether. The companies behind both stablecoins have frozen the stolen crypto, and the attorney general’s office will return that crypto to the victims once it secures permission from a court.
The attorney general’s office is seeking penalties, as well as prohibitions on the alleged scammers’ doing any crypto or commodities business in New York, among other things.
Aleks Gilbert is a New York-based DeFi correspondent for DL News. You can reach him at aleks@dlnews.com.
