Infiniweb says it owns the wallets and denies a scam connection
Hundreds of scam victims are seeking shares of $225 million in cryptocurrency that US law enforcement seized through Operation Big Tuna, an operation aimed at disrupting an alleged scam compound in the Philippines.
Infiniweb Technology, an online gaming company registered in the British Virgin Islands, challenged the Justice Department’s seizure in court in October 2025. The company said it owns the seized wallets and has nothing to do with the alleged scam operation. Infiniweb declined to comment, citing the active litigation.
Government lawyers had not responded to Infiniweb’s claim or explained how the alleged scam proceeds came into the company’s possession, The Wall Street Journal reported. The Journal also reported that casinos and gaming companies have long been used to launder illicit funds. Without evidence that Infiniweb knowingly participated in the alleged scam, the Justice Department could be forced to return all or part of the seized cryptocurrency.
US Attorney Jeanine Pirro announced the seizure at a press conference in June 2025. The DC attorney’s office was taking a lead on fighting cryptocurrency scams with an “eye toward making victims whole,” Pirro said in a press release.
Law firms representing victims then filed competing claims against the same pool of money. The Crypto Lawyers reviewed its blockchain analyses and identified 118 clients, including Miami insurance business owner Charles Stilwell, whose losses it believed could be tied to the seized cryptocurrency. A second law firm filed a similar claim for another 147 victims.
The Justice Department initially moved to strike the Crypto Lawyers’ claims, saying victims would need to apply directly to the department. Government lawyers also said a judge must approve the forfeiture before the department can return money to victims.
A Justice Department attorney said in August 2026 that the department was close to a possible agreement with Infiniweb and the victims. The arrangement could appoint an administrator to oversee claims and give preference to victims who could trace their funds to suspicious wallets identified in the Big Tuna case. Victims could still wait many months to learn what, if anything, they will receive.
The Journal reported that a growing number of Americans have been left financially devastated by scammers. Few scam victims recover their money, and no clear standards govern how authorities distribute seized cryptocurrency among competing claimants.
The seizures account for only a small portion of the tens of billions of dollars siphoned from Americans each year, though the amount seized has been growing, according to the Journal. Because alleged scammers are often abroad and difficult to arrest, law enforcement has increasingly focused on tracing their money.
Agents follow digital currencies across blockchains, the decentralized ledgers stored on computers around the world that publicly record transactions between digital wallets. When funds move beyond the reach of the US legal system, agents have sometimes persuaded foreign cryptocurrency companies to turn over allegedly stolen assets.
The Journal reported that this approach often involves taking large sums of suspicious-seeming cryptocurrency without knowing who currently controls it. Infiniweb’s ownership claim is challenging that approach in the case of the government’s $225 million seizure.
Operation Big Tuna began in January 2023 after OKX received a tip from a private investigator around December 2022 about a suspicious wallet on the cryptocurrency platform. The operation’s name refers to a nickname for John Krasinski’s character in the TV sitcom “The Office.”
A small OKX team investigated the tip and found dozens of wallets it suspected were moving billions of dollars in scam proceeds, the company said. OKX turned its findings over to the Secret Service’s San Francisco field office.
OKX requires identification and a matching selfie to open a wallet on its platform. When its investigators examined photographs linked to the suspicious accounts, many appeared to have been taken at the same facility, with someone other than the account holder operating the camera.
OKX ultimately identified 144 suspicious wallets that had processed 263,000 transactions worth $2.94 billion, the company said. Nearly all the accounts were accessed through IP addresses in the Philippines. Some account holders wore lanyards bearing the name ITECHNO Specialist Inc., a call center in Manila, according to court documents. ITECHNO could not be reached for comment.
Investigators traced large amounts of cryptocurrency from OKX to anonymous wallets holding USDT, a digital coin centrally controlled by El Salvador-based Tether. Because Tether can freeze and remint USDT regardless of where the coin is held, its structure gave law enforcement an opportunity to take control of the funds with the company’s cooperation.
Justice Department attorneys said Tether initially declined a request to freeze USDT held in two suspicious wallets. A Tether spokesman disputed that account, saying the company “didn’t refuse the freeze. We remained available to collaborate further on the matter, resulting in one of the best coordinated examples of enforcement action and maximizing the result of the freeze.”
Agents continued monitoring the funds. The Journal reported that pressure built on Tether in the following months to do more to police its digital currency as USDT’s reputation grew as a cryptocurrency favored by money launderers. By November 2023, Tether told the government it was ready to help.
Investigators traced the cryptocurrency onward from OKX and identified anonymous, unhosted wallets holding large sums of USDT. The funds had undergone “layering,” a process in which money is divided and moved through numerous wallets to obscure its path. Tether later froze the funds in the unhosted wallets.
Investigators suspected the wallets contained scam proceeds. Before Tether could remint the cryptocurrency, investigators needed to trace the money backward through a more complex pattern of transactions, the Journal reported. Investigators expected the origin points to be victims, but they needed assistance to determine their identities.
In February 2024, the Secret Service convened representatives from several cryptocurrency exchanges at its regional field office outside San Francisco for one of the agency’s “sprints.” During the two-day gathering, a Justice Department attorney could write a subpoena, take it to an exchange representative in the room and quickly receive a response. Obtaining the same account information outside the gathering could take days or weeks.
Anytime investigators identified a victim, there was a burst of excitement, said Samantha Rodriguez, an in-house investigator for Coinbase who attended the sprint. Secret Service agents then called suspected victims. In many cases, account holders had not realized they were being scammed, according to people who participated in the sprint.
The Secret Service contacted around 60 victims whose cumulative $19 million in losses could be traced to seven unhosted wallets, a fraction of the $225 million ultimately seized. Agents believed there were about 374 other victims but could not identify or contact them, government lawyers later said.
One identified victim was Shan Hanes, the former chief executive of Heartland Tri-State Bank, a community bank in Elkhart, Kansas. After Hanes lost all his own money in a cryptocurrency investment scam, he began sending the bank’s deposits to scammers, according to prosecutors.
The losses grew until the bank was forced to close, leaving its small-town investors and depositors in shock, the Journal reported. In 2024, Hanes was sentenced to more than 24 years in prison for embezzling $47.1 million in bank funds. A lawyer for Hanes declined to comment.
Global investment scams, sometimes called pig butchering, have expanded in recent years through sophisticated call centers in places including Southeast Asia, the Journal reported. Scammers can spend months forming emotional ties with victims before directing them toward seemingly lucrative cryptocurrency investments.
In 2022, Stilwell, a Miami insurance business owner in his 70s, began chatting on Facebook Messenger with a user who went by Amity Zhang. The user told him about a supposed cryptocurrency investment pool run by her uncle.
Stilwell began with a small investment and added money after the fake platform’s website displayed large returns. When his account reached $500,000, the platform’s customer service told him he had been flagged as a money launderer and needed to pay a large fee to prove he was not. He was also told he needed to pay fees and taxes before making withdrawals.
Over the next two months, Stilwell added more funds and opened a line of credit on his Miami home, but the scammers continued demanding fees. As he realized he was being scammed, he reported his losses to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Secret Service and then-Sen. Marco Rubio. He also found an online advertisement for a law firm called the Crypto Lawyers.
The Crypto Lawyers offers a range of cryptocurrency-related services and belongs to a small but growing industry of lawyers and forensic blockchain investigators who say they can help scam victims recover their money. A partner told Stilwell that an in-house investigator would first trace the cryptocurrency he had sent to the scammers.
Stilwell paid an initial $15,000 fee. The Crypto Lawyers said its fees vary by client and are often paid as a percentage of recovered losses.
Most of Stilwell’s money had ended up in wallets hosted by the cryptocurrency exchange Binance. The lawyers contacted Binance’s legal department and were told the exchange would freeze the money if they obtained a court order.
In May 2023, the lawyers filed a racketeering complaint in Miami federal court against the anonymous wallet holder, identified as defendant “1.” The firm described the defendant as an individual in China who had tricked Stilwell into sending money. The lawyers notified the wallets of the lawsuit by sending a special cryptocurrency token containing a link to the legal papers.
Fifteen months later, a magistrate judge denied Stilwell’s motion, saying he also needed to notify other anonymous alleged co-conspirators who might have participated in the scam. By then, his lawyers had determined that the funds traced to Binance had disappeared.
“It was deflating,” Stilwell said.
The Crypto Lawyers later determined that Stilwell was among 118 clients whose losses it believed could be tied to cryptocurrency seized through Operation Big Tuna.
Nivie Kaul, who lives in California, is also seeking money from the seizure. Kaul said in court filings that she gave up her work as a legal consultant and learned to trace cryptocurrency across digital ledgers after losing more than $8 million in a scam in 2022.
When US law enforcement told Kaul it could not help, she filed a legal claim in Turkey, where she had traced some of her money. The claim prompted an investigation into what Turkish prosecutors described as a professional money-laundering ring connected to the global scam industry.
A Turkish court in 2023 ordered the seizure of a digital wallet holding more than $100 million, from which Kaul said her losses would have been repaid. Before Turkey could distribute the money, US law enforcement took custody of the wallet sought by Kaul and other cryptocurrency holdings totaling $225 million through Operation Big Tuna.
Justice Department attorneys have said Kaul’s funds are not traceable to wallets seized in the Big Tuna case, though they said she can apply with other victims when the case concludes.
Turkish prosecutors filed a 1,548-page indictment describing a money-laundering operation they say operated from Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, a 500-year-old shopping market dating to the Ottoman Empire. As of July, the continuing Turkish investigation had produced more than 130 arrests.
Kaul launched the Digital Defenders Group to help other victims recover their funds. She has said she identified more than 200 other scam victims tied to the Turkish money-laundering ring.
Kaul recently asked the judge overseeing the Justice Department’s $225 million seizure to set aside the wallet targeted by Turkish prosecutors. She argued that the Turkish court’s seizure order gave her special status over the funds. Justice Department attorneys dismissed the Turkish order as a basis for a claim over the wallet.
“I have had no income for more than three years,” Kaul wrote in a recent court filing. “I have funded my investigation, the Turkish proceedings, and DDG’s work from my own savings.”
The US has filed no criminal charges connected to Operation Big Tuna.