Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez's office busts cryptocurrency scam

Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez held a press conference and announced that the Virtual Currency Unit had successfully disrupted and dismantled an online cryptocurrency scam that had defrauded many people across the United States of millions of dollars.
  Fraud refers to the practice of inducing victims into making fictitious cryptocurrency investments through malicious apps and software. Investments are laundered through multiple crypto addresses to regions outside of US jurisdiction.
“This is a growing form of fraud that defrauds Brooklyn residents and the nation out of billions of dollars every year,” said District Attorney Eric Gonzalez. “My office's strategy is to disrupt these schemes by capturing and shutting down their online infrastructure and educate the public on how to avoid becoming a victim.”
The Virtual Currency Unit was created by District Attorney Gonzalez in the fall of 2023 after receiving numerous complaints from Brooklyn residents who had lost significant amounts of money due to cryptocurrency scams.
One letter was from a 51-year-old woman who told the NYPD in March 2023 that she lost $22,680 after being added to online chat rooms discussing cryptocurrency investments. She was advised to download an app from coinformat.com and subsequently made eight deposits and saw her profits grow rapidly. Her account grew to an estimated total of $387,495, but when she tried to get her original investment back, she was told she had to pay taxes. When she complained, she was blocked from the chat and her money was gone.
The investigation found that her so-called cryptocurrency investments were transferred through multiple crypto addresses in a manner consistent with money laundering. They were ultimately transferred to a foreign cryptocurrency exchange account and cashed out by an individual in a region outside of US jurisdiction, possibly in China. The investigation identified additional victims of the same scheme in California, Pennsylvania and Illinois who interacted with coinformat.com and lost a total of $366,665.
In response, the DA's office seized coinformat.com and 20 associated domains, as well as three servers that hosted the sites.
Anyone can be the target of this insidious scheme. To protect the residents of Brooklyn and others, the District Attorney's Office launched a public awareness campaign.
District Attorney Eric Gonzalez stressed the importance of warning people that someone may be trying to lure them into becoming a victim, leading to them losing their cryptocurrency. As Alex Gurevich, director of public relations for the Brooklyn District Attorney's office, emphasized: “The scammers who lure people into cryptocurrency fraud also speak Russian. Many Russian-speaking people have become victims of this fraud and, to avoid this, even if the person has not lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, do not trust if they call you on the phone, offer to pay for something or invest money in something, but you intuitively feel that this worries you. Be careful not to give your personal information or bank account number to anyone over the phone.”

Interview with the director
communications department
with the office public
district attorney
Brooklyn
Alex Gurevich
recorded by a journalist
Marina Lagunova