New York Attorney General Wants to Serve NFT Cryptocurrency Thieves After $2.2 Million Heist – DL News

New York Attorney General Letitia James is filing a lawsuit against scammers who allegedly stole $2.2 million worth of cryptocurrencies.

She doesn’t know who they are, but it doesn’t matter. You will tell them a non-fungible code.

James’ office intends to serve anonymous scammers by dropping NFTs into their cryptocurrency wallets, the office said Thursday. The NFT will contain a link to a website containing documents detailing the lawsuit.

This will be the first time a regulator has served an alleged criminal with an NFT, the office said.

For all its revolutionary potential, blockchain technology is, at its core, little more than tamper-resistant public ledgers. While prosecutors have not yet identified the alleged scammers, they do know their cryptocurrency wallet addresses.

This is not the first time lawyers have had to get creative in the murky, anonymous world of cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is now a trillion dollar asset, and yet people still aren’t discussion The identity of its creator, who bears the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

Last year, lawyers filed a class action lawsuit against decentralized finance giant Lido DAO served The seemingly leaderless digital co-op posted the lawsuit on the Lido DAO governance forum, where members discuss changes to the Lido protocol.

It’s not clear when New York’s attorney general will serve the alleged fraudsters. The office did not immediately respond to a DL News inquiry on Friday.

According to the complaint, scammers offering fake work-from-home job opportunities convinced their victims to purchase stablecoins and send them to the scammers’ cryptocurrency wallets.

“Scammers sent text messages to New Yorkers promising them flexible, well-paying jobs, only to trick them into buying cryptocurrencies and then stealing them from them,” James said in a message. statement.

From January to June 2024, the alleged scammers were sending unsolicited messages and often posing as employees working on behalf of real companies, according to the prosecutor’s office.

Victims who responded were asked to continue the conversation via WhatsApp, where they were told they could earn money by posting product reviews on company websites.

Posting reviews — for products priced with Tether — requires victims to maintain a “working account balance equal to or greater than the ‘price’ assigned to the product,” the “trainers” said. lawsuit.

Victims were told they could receive cryptocurrencies in exchange for reviewing products and achieving certain achievements. But the pay they were earning was fake, while the account balances they were required to hold “simply went into wallets owned and/or controlled by the defendants.”

One victim, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Croatia referred to only as “Ally,” lost more than $100,000 in the scam, according to the lawsuit. Another technology sales representative, 38 years old named Dina, who lives in Florida, lost more than $300,000.

The victims’ cryptocurrencies were transferred to three wallets containing approximately $2.2 million in USDC and Tether. The companies behind both stablecoins have frozen the stolen cryptocurrencies, and the prosecutor’s office will return those cryptocurrencies to the victims once it receives court permission.

The Attorney General’s Office is seeking sanctions, as well as bans, on alleged fraudsters conducting any business in cryptocurrencies or commodities in New York, among other things.

Alex Gilbert is a DeFi reporter based in New York DL News. You can access it at aleks@dlnews.com.