U.S. Treasury Drops the Hammer on Notorious Crypto Scam Hub

Holy smokes! The U.S. Treasury Department just threw down some serious sanctions on Funnull Technology Inc., a shady outfit based in the Philippines. These guys are smack dab in the middle of a mind-blowing cyber fraud network that's been fueling cryptocurrency scams like nobody's business.

Funnull? Yeah, they're the masterminds behind the tech that's powering hundreds of thousands of scammy websites. We're talking about those nasty "pig butchering" scams where slick fraudsters catfish you, pretending to be your new love interest or financial guru, only to sucker you into pouring your cash into fake crypto investments. Brutal!

Listen up, folks: U.S. victims have been hit hard, losing over $200 million thanks to these Funnull-linked sites. And get this – the average person's out more than $150,000. Ouch! The brains behind the operation, Chinese national Liu Lizhi, got slapped with sanctions too, according to the Treasury.

The Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, under Executive Orders 13694 and 14144, brought the hammer down on Funnull. And they didn't do it alone – they teamed up with the FBI, who's now dropping a cybersecurity advisory to help the private sector sniff out and take down these scam sites.

Deputy Treasury Secretary Michael Faulkender laid it out straight: "These actions reflect our commitment to disrupting the networks that power cybercrime and target Americans."

Crypto scamming and phishing

Treasury bigwigs spilled the beans on how Funnull pulled off their dirty deeds. They were buying IP addresses in bulk from cloud service providers and flipping them to scammers running fake investment platforms and phishing sites. Sneaky, right? They even used domain generation algorithms to churn out web addresses like it's going out of style, and handed out design templates to help cybercriminals pose as legit financial services.

And get this – in 2024, Funnull allegedly messed with a code repository used by developers to secretly redirect traffic from legit sites to scams and gambling platforms. Some of these are even tied to Chinese money laundering ops. Talk about a tangled web!

Liu Lizhi? Yeah, he's the one pulling the strings at Funnull, managing the whole shebang. From assigning domains to scammers to keeping the infrastructure running for fraud, phishing, and shady gambling – he's the man behind the curtain.

The Treasury's move comes hot on the heels of a September 2023 alert from their Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, warning about pig butchering scams and their links to Southeast Asian crime groups. These groups are exploiting victims of labor trafficking to pull off their scams. It's a whole new level of low.