Scams

The U.S. Justice Department said a public-private effort dubbed “Disruption Week” ran from May 18 to May 21, with tech and crypto firms helping disrupt more than 1.4 million accounts tied to Southeast Asian scam networks. The DOJ said information-sharing also supported the freezing of more than $3.8 million in cryptocurrency linked to laundered funds stolen from Americans.

A purported AI-powered crypto trading operation linked to Nathan Fuller is facing SEC scrutiny over claims he raised $12.3 million from investors between 2022 and 2024. The SEC alleges only 3% of the funds went to real trading, while about $6.2 million was used for personal spending and $5.5 million was paid out to earlier investors.

Crypto exploits and scams led to about $68.3 million in losses across 60 confirmed incidents in May 2026, with $9.38 million later returned. Verus and Thorchain were the largest single events at $11.52 million and $10.12 million, while phishing contributed roughly $2.6 million. Code vulnerabilities dominated the breakdown at $45.13 million, followed by wallet compromises at $13.77 million.

The U.S. SEC says it sued Texas entrepreneur Nathan Fuller after he allegedly raised $12.3 million from roughly 150 investors by marketing an “AI” crypto-arbitrage bot strategy that did not exist. The complaint says the fundraising ran from at least October 2022 through mid-2024, with only about $380,000 used to buy crypto and at least $6.2 million allegedly diverted for personal spending.

Cyble reports that an Android banking trojan dubbed OverlayPhantom is targeting more than 180 banking, financial and cryptocurrency apps across 10 countries. The malware is spread via malicious URLs that mimic trusted apps, then shows convincing fake in-app screens to steal PINs and other credentials and enable account takeover.

The U.S. government, under the Trump administration, has designated Brazil's Comando Vermelho (CV) and Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) as Specially Designated Global Terrorists, with Foreign Terrorist Organization status planned to begin on June 5. The move cites their alleged drug-trafficking operations and claims they used cryptocurrency—including bitcoin mining—to launder proceeds, alongside reports of ASIC seizures during an operation in Rio de Janeiro.

A Sberbank study says Russian fraudsters laundered about 295 billion rubles (over $4 billion) in a year by routing stolen money through roughly 900 crypto exchange services operating in 2025. The findings surface as Russia moves toward tighter rules that could cut the number of authorized exchangers and shift legal trading to approved intermediaries by July 1, 2026.

Ethereum posted a new on-chain activity record over the past 30 days, with daily transactions topping 3.62M at the end of April. Lower fees after the Glamsterdam upgrade—down 78%, with simple transfers as low as $0.004—appear to be enabling a surge in address-poisoning and dusting activity that puts user wallets at higher risk.

Ethereum's Clear Signing went live on May 12, 2026, with Ledger, Trezor and MetaMask switching signature prompts from hex strings to human-readable transaction details. The change targets signature-phishing losses that reached $6.27 million from 4,741 victims in Q1 2026, while keeping blind signing possible but more avoidable. The standard improves clarity for approvals such as "unlimited" token spend, though it does not remove risks tied to compromised apps or incomplete dApp metadata.

A report cited by Bitcoin journalist Joe Nakamoto says France accounts for about 70% of so-called crypto "wrench attacks," where victims are physically threatened to surrender digital assets. Nakamoto said France has recorded 41 crypto-related kidnappings so far in 2026, and linked the spike to centralized KYC databases and past breaches such as Ledger's 2020 customer-data leak.