DOJ, Coinbase, SpaceX Freeze $3.8M in Crypto During 'Disruption Week

Private-sector firms, in coordination with the U.S. Department of Justice's Scam Center Strike Force, froze more than $3.8 million in cryptocurrency linked to fraud schemes during an anti-scam operation targeting networks operating in Southeast Asia. For the victims involved, that figure is a lot of money. For the rest of crypto, it is roughly one quiet Tuesday.

Dubbed "Disruption Week," the operation was joined by Apple, Coinbase, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Silent Push, SpaceX, TRM Labs, and Zenlayer. Yes, that SpaceX — the rocket company. Meta played a key role in coordinating the event and encouraging broader private-sector participation, the DOJ said in a statement on Wednesday. According to the statement, the operation led to the arrests of seven scammers in Thailand by the Royal Thai Police Anti-Cyber Scam Center. Multiple scammers and scam platforms were identified and referred to U.S. authorities for investigation and possible prosecution.

Coinbase said separately that its contribution to the operation included freezing more than $3 million in cryptocurrency assets tied to the criminal networks. The company said the broader effort resulted in more than 1.4 million disabled accounts, thousands of Starlink kits terminated — apparently scammers also like low-latency internet — and 63 arrests in total.

The effort also led to the decommissioning of servers, colocation environments, and hosting infrastructure linked to scam networks operating across Southeast Asia.

Cross-border effort against crypto fraud. Federal investigators from the FBI, U.S. Secret Service, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Homeland Security Investigations provided intelligence on targets, per the DOJ statement. Foreign participants also joined the "first-of-its-kind event," including the Australian Federal Police, Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, New Zealand Police, Royal Thai Police, and the UK National Crime Agency.

"One of the best tools we have in combatting these illicit actors is our partnerships and they are only getting stronger," FBI Director Kash Patel said in the statement. "We're preventing further victimization by working with other agencies, our foreign law enforcement counterparts, and the private sector who have all taken part in this Disruption Week."

The DOJ noted that data from the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center showed reported losses from cryptocurrency investment fraud rose 24% to more than $7.2 billion in 2025, up from $5.8 billion in 2024 and $3.96 billion in 2023. Apparently the only chart going more vertical than a typical altcoin is the one tracking reported scam losses. Many of the schemes are operated from large-scale scam compounds in Cambodia, Laos, and Burma along the Thai border, according to the statement.

The DOJ said criminal syndicates often recruit workers with promises of high-paying jobs before forcing them to conduct fraud operations targeting victims in the U.S. and other countries. The remote-work listing, it turns out, did not mention any of this.

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