Omaha woman defrauded out of $730,000 using cryptocurrency

A cryptocurrency scam is costing an Omaha woman hundreds of thousands of dollars. It’s a money laundering case detailed in federal court documents. The victim in this case has not been identified by anything other than initials: MMCivil court documents filed Wednesday will have money turned over to the federal government that the feds said the woman was defrauded from. A federal complaint shows the case goes back to 2021, when an Omaha woman met someone on an online dating platform who convinced her to invest her savings in cryptocurrency. Over three months, the victim deposited $732,937.10 in bitcoin and sent it to a “bitcoin miner.” The feds said the woman later tried to cash out her bitcoin, but the miner told her she had to pay an 18% clearance fee. , but the complaint said the woman never got her money back, so she called local police to report it. A federal investigation outlined in the complaint details nine separate accounts held at a cryptocurrency company base d from the Cayman Islands that were used to facilitate an electronic fraud and money laundering scheme against the victim. Exhibits attached to the complaint show bitcoin traced from transactions between the victim and the accounts at the cryptocurrency company. That complaint, found by Seamus Hughes, said the FBI secured an order to freeze the accounts and seized the money in an FBI-controlled account in February 2022. The lawsuit said that because the money was derived from the proceeds of illegal activity, it should be forfeited to the United States. It requests all cryptocurrency, virtual currency, funds, money and other things of value stored in or available on cryptocurrency company associated with a particular user ID. The court records do not mention whether the victim will get the money back. It does not refer to any criminal cases despite naming several people, including the alleged account owners of the nine targeted accounts. A federal judge has been assigned to the case.