In short
- The U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace for Connecticut has recovered greater than $600,000 in cryptocurrency from a fraud scheme.
- The fraud focused a Ledger {hardware} pockets consumer with a phishing letter directing them to carry out a safety test, stealing $234,000 in crypto.
- The case is the most recent phishing try concentrating on crypto customers following knowledge breaches at {hardware} pockets producers.
The U.S. Lawyer’s Workplace for the District of Connecticut has recovered and forfeited over $600,000 price of cryptocurrency from a fraud scheme, the most recent in a sequence of profitable digital asset seizures by federal regulation enforcement.
In keeping with a Division of Justice press launch, the seizure came about after a Ledger {hardware} pockets consumer was focused by a phishing rip-off in September 2025.
The consumer, a Connecticut resident, acquired a letter purporting to be from “Ledger Safety & Compliance,” instructing them to carry out a compulsory safety test. The truth is, following the directions within the letter enabled the fraudsters to compromise the consumer’s {hardware} pockets, making off with $234,000 in cryptocurrency.
The FBI and state police traced the movement of funds, enabling them to grab some $600,000 within the USDT stablecoin which was topic to a civil forfeiture grievance alleging that it was the proceeds of wire fraud and cash laundering.
Decrypt reached out to Ledger for touch upon the case however didn’t instantly obtain a response.
That is the most recent in a sequence of phishing incidents concentrating on crypto {hardware} pockets customers, with a modus operandi much like that seen in a lately recognized marketing campaign leveraging pretend postal letters. In that case, bodily letters had been despatched to Trezor and Ledger homeowners that included firm logos and holograms, alongside a QR code directing victims to the phishing web site.
On the time, cybercrime marketing consultant David Sehyeon Baek informed Decrypt that scammers’ shift from digital to bodily mail “borrows credibility” from the postal system. “A letter along with your identify and residential tackle mainly alerts, ‘we are able to find you,’ and that triggers a a lot stronger security response,” he defined.
The marketing campaign follows years of information breaches at {hardware} pockets producers, together with a 2020 e-commerce breach at Ledger exposing over a million emails and a January 2026 breach at its e-commerce accomplice affecting order knowledge.
Rival {hardware} pockets producer Trezor has likewise had shopper knowledge uncovered by incidents such because the 2022 MailChimp insider exploit and a later third-party assist portal breach affecting roughly 66,000 customers, triggering ongoing phishing campaigns. Decrypt has reached out to Ledger for remark and can replace this text ought to they reply.
Federal and worldwide authorities have seized substantial cryptocurrency quantities in latest months. The Feds sought forfeiture of $200,000 in USDT tied to a Tinder “pig butchering” rip-off, whereas Florida seized $1.5 million in Dogecoin, Pepe, and Solana tokens in a case involving a Chinese language nationwide.
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