An illustration picture taken in London on May 8, 2022, shows a gold plated souvenir cryptocurrency Tether (USDT) coin arranged beside a screen displaying a trading chart.
AFP via Getty Images
A California victim of a cryptocurrency scam known as pig butchering, who lost over $1 million last year, is now set to receive approximately 10 percent of his losses back, according to a local prosecutor.
Erin West, a deputy district attorney in Santa Clara County, Calif., told Forbes on Friday that a portion of over $318,000 worth of cryptocurrency previously seized by her office actually belongs to a scam victim that Forbes has identified as Cy. (Forbes previously agreed to identify the 52-year-old Bay Area man under that pseudonym.)
Since that seizure, the Santa Clara district attorney’s office has begun the legal process of identifying precisely who owns those funds, and the procedures of how to return them to their rightful owners.
“We have funds in our government wallet that belong to [Cy],” she told Forbes by text message. “$113,000.”
The prosecutor soon explained by phone to Forbes that during the process of analyzing and returning the seized crypto to victims, members of the “REACT Task Force,” an alliance of local, state, and federal law enforcement officials in the Bay Area, traced $113,000 worth to the losses previously reported by Cy.
The funds are held in a cryptocurrency “stablecoin” known as USDT, or Tether. The REACT Task Force investigators,…
