The scam began with a message, then a friendly exchange. A stranger directed the victim to a cryptocurrency investment site that appeared professional — slick design, charts, even customer support. The first deposit showed a modest profit. So did the next. Encouraged, the victim sent more, even borrowing money to keep up. Then, without warning, the platform stopped responding. The account balance disappeared.
“That’s how they do it,” Jamie Lam, an investigative analyst with the US Secret Service, told law enforcement officials in Bermuda last month. “They’ll send you a photo of a really good-looking guy or girl. But it’s probably some old guy in Russia.”
Secret Service investigators traced the fraud to the domain name behind the fake investment site. Using open-source tools, they found out when it was registered, by whom and how it had been paid for. A cryptocurrency payment pointed them to another wallet. A brief VPN failure exposed an IP address.
Lam is part of the agency’s Global Investigative Operations Center or GIOC, a team specializing in digital financial crimes. Their tools are software, subpoenas, and spreadsheets, not badges or guns.
“It’s not always that hard,” Lam said. “Sometimes you just need patience.”
Patience and digital tools have helped the GIOC seize nearly $400 million in digital assets over the last decade, a figure not previously reported, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.
Much of that trove sits in a single cold-storage wallet that now ranks among the most valuable anywhere. After leading crackdowns on digital currencies such as Liberty Reserve and E-Gold in the 1990s, the agency best known for protecting US presidents has become one of the world’s biggest crypto custodians.
At the center of the operation is Kali Smith, a lawyer who directs the Secret Service’s cryptocurrency strategy.
Her team has conducted workshops in more than 60 countries to train local law enforcers and prosecutors in unmasking digital crimes. The agency targets juris