FBI Seeks Victims Connected to FUNNULL Pig Butchering Crypto Investment Scam

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is looking for victims connected to the FUNNULL pig butchering crypto investment scheme.

In a new press release, the FBI states that it’s seeking those affected by the pig butchering scheme, which typically involves scammers gaining the trust of victims over time to convince them to invest digital assets into fraudulent websites that they control.

Once the victims invest, they are further tricked by lucrative returns on their investment before ultimately being locked out of their accounts and losing access to their funds.

Earlier this week, FUNNULL – a Philippines-based computer infrastructure firm – was sanctioned by the US Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

According to authorities, FUNNULL purchases data such as IP addresses in bulk and sells them to criminals to host fraudulent investment websites and other malicious content. It was found that the firm could have sold data to up to hundreds of thousands of websites that run these types of scams.

The Treasury Department said at the time that the majority of crypto scams reported to the FBI were linked to FUNNULL and that US-based victims lost about a combined $200 million to these types of schemes, or $150,000 per individual affected.

Sanctions were also placed on FUNNULL’s administrator, Chinese national Liu Lizhi, who allegedly was in possession of documents that tracked data on the firm’s employees, including ranking them based on performance.