Following a seizure by police officers in their Economic Crime Unit acting on intelligence inquiries about Ethereum (ETH), Greater Manchester Police have taken possession of around $22.25M worth at current prices to be used as evidence for future proceedings against the owner or owners who may not yet be identified and charged with any crime related to these funds being found under circumstances that are still unclear according to authorities.
Investigators found $9.5 million worth of ETH and an additional $12.7million without specifying the type of cryptocurrency it was- this is a huge find!
To prevent more scams from happening, the police have been conducting a crackdown on crypto-related frauds.
These scammers are using Binance Smart Chain to lure people into their fake services and steal money. The victims of this scam include residents in Europe, China, Australia, and Hong Kong as well as UK citizens themselves!
In a twist of events that will make you shake your head in disbelief, it looks like scammers operating a popular cryptocurrency exchange have been found out.
It turns out the people running this website waited until there was significant money deposited before shutting down their site and transferring all of those funds into accounts they controlled!
This is not something to joke about though because these thieves were tracked down by police who managed to recover $9 million worth of Ethereum from an encrypted USB stick while also catching them here in Manchester for just as short a period of time.
Greater Manchester Police are on the hunt for victims who have been scammed. They arrested a 23-year-old male and a 25-year-old female, but they were released due to ongoing investigations.
The police department is currently looking for people that might be potential targets of these fraudsters in order to return any funds lost by them during their scamming spree.
With the rise in online and phone-led lifestyles, currencies have come to be seen as a new form of money that is often used for trading.
With those trends comes an increase in opportunistic criminals looking for ways they can exploit gaps within technology or take advantage of people who are not knowledgeable about these avenues yet.
Joe Harrop from Greater Manchester Police’s Economic Crime Unit discussed how this has become such a problem: “We’re seeing more instances where someone will contact us after spotting what’s called “crypto-malware,” which takes your card details through keylogging software – so it looks like everything you type on your keyboard actually plugs into somebody else’s computer.”
Detectives from the UK Metropolitan Police’s Economic Crime Command recently seized £114 million ($158.8 million) worth in digital assets, reportedly related to a money laundering case and it is believed to be one of the largest globally.
The authorities were able to seize these vast sums due in part because they conducted an undercover operation that was targeting high-value goods like cars and boats being sold for cryptocurrency transactions over Facebook Marketplace when people are looking at buying them with cash or by some other means rather than traditional bank transfers which can leave traces behind on this sort of activity so police could follow up after seizing their stolen property back if needed.
