Seeing the words “a $950 million investment scam”, many people’s first reaction is “crypto is in trouble again”… But in this news story, crypto is actually very hard to call the main character..
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On September 25, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit against a foreign-exchange scheme that had been operating since 2019.. From June 2019 to December 2023, the scheme opened more than 400,000 accounts, bringing in over $950 million—over 6,000 U.S. accounts, totaling at least $27 million..
Most people see it as “yet another high-yield scam”… The playbook isn’t new: participants are told that 70% of their funds will be handed over to professional traders, trading robots, and AI to trade foreign exchange, and the remaining 30% will be used for so-called academy courses.. Participants can also earn rewards by recruiting new people; when the money runs short, they simply use money from later joiners to pay the earlier people..
But what’s really worth watching is its cash register.. The complaint mentions that the scheme uses crypto wallets to collect and make payments. Some of the money doesn’t go through banks; instead, it moves across jurisdictions on-chain.. In internal communications, even people discussed whether to replace the receiving wallet..
This is where things start to get intriguing.. In these cases, crypto isn’t the thing being cheated—it’s the pipeline.. The reason it was chosen is fairly straightforward: fast cross-border transfers, fast settlement, and no need to open bank accounts one by one..
But read it from another angle, it’s a completely different story.. Transfers on-chain leave a permanent trail—who transferred to whom, when, and how much are all written down.. In an era when everything was done via bank transfers only, enforcement had to pull records case by case; now, many parts of the process are, by nature, public ledgers that can be checked..
So the claim that “crypto is good for hiding money” is being slowly whittled away by the enforcement theory in case after case.. For these schemes, on-chain is not only a faster cash register, but also a clearer evidentiary chain—two sides of the same thing..
But the question is: enforcement can trace the trail to grab the path, yet it can’t necessarily catch the people or the money.. Who is behind the wallet, how many jurisdictions the funds crossed, and when it was converted into fiat currency—that’s where the real pursuit of stolen funds gets stuck.. And this complaint hasn’t been tested at trial yet; the allegations are currently only one side’s account..
So what’s truly worth keeping an eye on isn’t whether this news is hot, but how far enforcement will be able to use on-chain records in what comes next.. If cases like this start to consistently treat on-chain activity as the first crime scene for investigation, then who benefits from “transparency” and who doesn’t will need to be recalculated from scratch..
⚖️ 进群蹲一手消息
On September 25, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) filed a lawsuit against a foreign-exchange scheme that had been operating since 2019.. From June 2019 to December 2023, the scheme opened more than 400,000 accounts, bringing in over $950 million—over 6,000 U.S. accounts, totaling at least $27 million..
Most people see it as “yet another high-yield scam”… The playbook isn’t new: participants are told that 70% of their funds will be handed over to professional traders, trading robots, and AI to trade foreign exchange, and the remaining 30% will be used for so-called academy courses.. Participants can also earn rewards by recruiting new people; when the money runs short, they simply use money from later joiners to pay the earlier people..
But what’s really worth watching is its cash register.. The complaint mentions that the scheme uses crypto wallets to collect and make payments. Some of the money doesn’t go through banks; instead, it moves across jurisdictions on-chain.. In internal communications, even people discussed whether to replace the receiving wallet..
This is where things start to get intriguing.. In these cases, crypto isn’t the thing being cheated—it’s the pipeline.. The reason it was chosen is fairly straightforward: fast cross-border transfers, fast settlement, and no need to open bank accounts one by one..
But read it from another angle, it’s a completely different story.. Transfers on-chain leave a permanent trail—who transferred to whom, when, and how much are all written down.. In an era when everything was done via bank transfers only, enforcement had to pull records case by case; now, many parts of the process are, by nature, public ledgers that can be checked..
So the claim that “crypto is good for hiding money” is being slowly whittled away by the enforcement theory in case after case.. For these schemes, on-chain is not only a faster cash register, but also a clearer evidentiary chain—two sides of the same thing..
But the question is: enforcement can trace the trail to grab the path, yet it can’t necessarily catch the people or the money.. Who is behind the wallet, how many jurisdictions the funds crossed, and when it was converted into fiat currency—that’s where the real pursuit of stolen funds gets stuck.. And this complaint hasn’t been tested at trial yet; the allegations are currently only one side’s account..
So what’s truly worth keeping an eye on isn’t whether this news is hot, but how far enforcement will be able to use on-chain records in what comes next.. If cases like this start to consistently treat on-chain activity as the first crime scene for investigation, then who benefits from “transparency” and who doesn’t will need to be recalculated from scratch..
