Coinbase froze more than $3 million in cryptocurrency tied to Southeast Asian fraud syndicates as part of a US Department of Justice (DoJ) operation that pulled major technology firms into a coordinated strike against scam networks draining billions from American victims. The exchange acted under the DOJ’s Scam Center Strike Force during a four-day event the department branded “Disruption Week,” convened in Washington from May 18 to May 21 and announced on June 3.

Federal investigators from the FBI, the Secret Service, and Homeland Security Investigations handed private participants intelligence on specific Southeast Asian targets, and those firms moved to freeze accounts, sever infrastructure, and cut off funds linked to cryptocurrency investment fraud. Across the private sector, participants voluntarily froze more than $3.8 million in crypto tied to laundering stolen funds, with Coinbase accounting for the bulk of that figure.

Coinbase Freezes Scam-linked Crypto

Coinbase joined Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, SpaceX, TRM Labs, Silent Push, and Zenlayer to pool intelligence and act against syndicates running romance scams, investment fraud, and forced-labor compounds that target people worldwide. The company said its share—the largest single contribution among the firms involved—went directly to wallets controlled by those networks.

“This operation is proof that scammers can’t be stopped by any single company or agency acting alone,” Coinbase said.

Coinbase used the operation to defend the role of blockchain in fraud investigations, arguing that public ledgers give law enforcement a transparent and permanent record of every transaction that traditional finance often cannot match. That same on-chain tracing has also surfaced in recovery fights, including one in which an investor sued Coinbase to recover assets frozen after a 2024 phishing attack.

Strike Force Widens DOJ’s Scam Fight

Foreign law enforcement counterparts joined the effort, including the Royal Thai Police, the UK National Crime Agency, the Australian Federal Police, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, and New Zealand Police, while Meta coordinated private-sector participation. The DOJ said the week disrupted criminal activity across more than 1.4 million social media and email accounts, decommissioned servers and hosting infrastructure linked to scam networks, and produced the arrests of seven scammers in Thailand alongside new cases opened by the Royal Thai Police Anti-Cyber Scam Center. US Attorney Jeanine Pirro noted that

“Cyber-enabled and crypto investment fraud is devastating Main Street Americans, wiping out life savings and preying on some of our most vulnerable citizens.”

Investment scams became the most commonly reported crime type in 2023, with cryptocurrency investment fraud making up 83 percent of that category, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center. Reported losses climbed from $3.96 billion in 2023 to $5.8 billion in 2024 before rising 24 percent to more than $7.2 billion last year.

Many of the schemes run out of industrial-scale compounds in Cambodia, Laos, and Burma along the Thai border, where trafficked workers are forced to defraud victims under threat of violence. Coinbase has traced funds out of comparable operations before, helping the US Secret Service seize $225 million in stolen cryptocurrency in June 2025 from a human-trafficking syndicate behind pig-butchering romance scams. The exchange has also faced federal scrutiny of its own, with the DOJ opening a criminal investigation into a 2025 insider data breach in which overseas contractors were bribed to leak user data.