Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Joy Campbell’s office (pictured) has filed charges and seized the assets of a cryptocurrency fraud company known as Spirebit. Proceeds are now being returned to victims of the scheme. Charles Krupa/AP Hide caption
Toggle caption Charles Krupa/AP
Alexei Madan never thought that day would come.
This week, he received a check for $140,000 in the mail from Massachusetts officials. This was all the money Madan lost in a get-rich-quick cryptocurrency scam.
“If all your money was stolen and you never expected it back, how would you feel if it actually came back?” Madan, 69, said. I’m overjoyed. And it was also a shock. ”
The funds were part of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of virtual currency seized by Massachusetts authorities from a scam that targeted Russian-speaking seniors online and, in some cases, stole their savings.
The Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office has launched an investigation into the company, known as Spirevit. An NPR investigation last year detailed the stories of two victims who were lured into an investment scheme, only to discover it was fake after they transferred large sums of money to SpireBit’s company. It turned out that this was the case. Cryptocurrency wallet.
SpireBit lured victims into its scheme by using advertisements on social media that promised lucrative returns on investment. Spirevit ran ads on Facebook and Instagram that falsely portrayed Elon Musk as endorsing the company with a Russian voiceover.
But NPR couldn’t find any trace of the real investment company. The people listed as company executives turned out to be just stock photos and fake LinkedIn profiles. Spirevit’s alleged London address turned out to be for a kitchenware company. When victims tried to withdraw money, the company sent them forged bank documents. After NPR’s reporting, UK financial regulators classified SpireBit as being run by “fraudsters” and issued a public warning.
When NPR tried to reach Spirebit for comment last year, the company said via the messaging app Telegram that cryptocurrency trading is volatile, adding, “Our activities are regulated according to the laws of the country in which we are headquartered. ” he replied. I found the location of the company. ” That account has now been deleted.
NPR’s investigation attracted the attention of Massachusetts authorities, who in December filed charges against Spirevit, a corporation known as SBT Investments.
Investigators posed as SpireBit customers and were able to identify the cryptocurrency wallets used by SpireBit. In a ruling issued in May, state authorities won a court order freezing the company’s assets on the trading platform Binance.
Although the full extent of SpireBit’s activities remains unclear, the company’s tactics are part of a rapidly growing type of online fraud known as pig butchering. The name comes from the process of gaining someone’s trust and building a friendship over a period of weeks or months, the process of fattening a pig before killing it, which in this case meant stealing a large amount of money. I will.
According to the FBI, cryptocurrency scammers stole more than $5.6 billion from Americans online last year.
According to a May court order, Massachusetts law enforcement authorities were able to seize a total of $269,000 from Spirebit’s cryptocurrency wallet, with the majority of the money being distributed among four victims in the state. .
Another SpireBit victim profiled by NPR, Naum Lanzman, 75, of Los Angeles, lost $340,000 in savings that she had accumulated over decades as a small business owner. His family reported the theft to the California Attorney General’s Office, but no formal investigation was initiated.
Officials from the Massachusetts and California attorney general’s offices did not respond to requests for interviews.
