Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez said his office and the FBI have seized and disrupted 241 web domains and 112 servers used to steal millions of dollars from Russian-speaking victims in Brooklyn through a cryptocurrency investment scam.
How the Scam Reached Russian Speakers in Brooklyn
Victims responded to Russian-language Facebook advertisements promoting investment opportunities. Advisers then walked them through opening cryptocurrency accounts and transferring funds. After the money moved, the scammers locked victims out of their accounts and demanded “fees and taxes” to release it.
Fake Platforms That Referenced US Agencies and Elon Musk
Some of the seized sites mimicked investment platforms. Some referenced US agencies or Elon Musk, using recognizable names to lend credibility. Infrastructure sat in Ukraine and other Eastern European countries, and search warrants were executed in several countries.
A Second Scam Targeting the Same Victims
Seized data revealed a secondary scheme. Scammers contacted victims weeks after the first loss and offered paid recovery of the stolen cryptocurrency. People who had already lost money were thus targeted again with a promise to reverse the loss.
Targeting the European Backend
The investigation began three years ago. The Brooklyn DA’s office has disrupted about 400 cryptocurrency-fraud domains in two years, but the sites re-emerge quickly. Because domain seizures alone did not hold, the operation targeted the backend servers in Europe that host the sites.
The shift reflects a lesson from the earlier disruptions: a seized domain can be replaced within a short time, while servers and the data on them take longer to rebuild. The DA’s office says the seizures produced the data that revealed the recovery scam.
$300,000 Recovered
About $300,000 was clawed back. Officials described millions of dollars stolen, so the recovered amount is a fraction of the losses. The announcement does not give a total loss figure or say how many victims were affected.
Treasury Figure Puts the Brooklyn Scam in a $12.7 Billion Context
A Treasury report last month said $12.7 billion was stolen from Americans in crypto investment scams between September 2023 and December 2025. Set against that total, the Brooklyn operation addresses a single Russian-language slice of a much larger problem, and the recovered sum is small by comparison.
Brooklyn DA Gonzalez Pursues a Russian-Language Fraud Network With the FBI
The case is a county prosecutor’s operation with FBI participation, aimed at victims defined by language and neighborhood. A local district attorney’s office pursued the case for three years and obtained cooperation to execute warrants abroad. The announcement does not name defendants or say whether any arrests were made, so the people behind the scheme have not been identified in the available reporting.
Search warrants across several countries show that the case depended on foreign cooperation. The sources do not name the countries other than Ukraine, which is cited as one location of infrastructure, and they do not describe how the foreign authorities took part.
Whether the 112 Seized Servers Stop the Scam From Returning
The announcement says domain and server seizures were carried out with international warrants. The DA’s office has already seen sites return after earlier takedowns, which leaves the durability of this operation as the open question. Whether the loss of 112 servers prevents the network from rebuilding will show in whether Russian-language investment ads and look-alike sites resurface in Brooklyn.
The seizure of the servers also gives investigators data they did not have from domain takedowns alone, including the evidence of the follow-up recovery scheme. The seized data showed that scammers returned weeks later to offer paid recovery of stolen cryptocurrency, so the operation drew revenue twice from the same victim list. That material could support later cases against the operators, but the sources describe no charges so far.
