U.S Government moves to sue for millions of USDT purportedly carted away

The United States Attorney’s office of recent filed a civil complaint accusing four digital wallets containing more than 9.8 million Tether (USDT) of being in on a wire fraud, computer fraud, and money laundering. The complaint was led by U.S. Attorney, Tracy Wilkinson.

In April 2021, a California resident was swindled out of over 200 Bitcoin (BTC) by someone pretending to be a Coinbase employee, court documents stated.

It appears that the unidentified victim, shortly after buying some 200 BTC on Coinbase Pro, was contacted by Coinbase customer service.

An alleged representative of the platform told the victim that the amount of the purchase had frozen the victim’s account and that a transaction limit increase was required to process the funds. Furthermore, the scammer suggested that the victim upgrade to Coinbase Prime.

The swindler initiated a transaction once the victim gave them access to the account via remote desktop to which they transferred approximately 206 BTC to what was supposed to be the victim’s new Prime wallet.

 

Within a few hours, several smaller transactions were also executed which resulted in the theft of nearly $11.5 million in digital assets from the victim’s Coinbase account.

 

The claim further describes how the digital assets were divided up into smaller transaction pieces and later concentrated in the four suspect wallets.

Source : Nairametrics