By Ovunc Kutlu
ISTANBUL (AA) - The US Justice Department announced Tuesday it seized nearly $9 million worth of Tether -- a cryptocurrency pegged one-to-one with the US dollar.
The seized funds were traced to cryptocurrency addresses allegedly associated with an organization that exploited more than 70 victims through romance scams and cryptocurrency confidence scams, which are widely known as “pig butchering," it said in a statement.
"These scammers prey on ordinary investors by creating websites that tell victims their investments are working to make them money. The truth is that these international criminal actors are simply stealing cryptocurrency and leaving victims with nothing," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri from the agency’s Criminal Division.
The agency said criminal actors worked to target victims and convince them to make cryptocurrency deposits by fraudulently representing that the victims were making investments with trusted firms and cryptocurrency exchanges. But, in reality, the purported firms and cryptocurrency exchanges were non-existent trading platforms, it added.
Tether's market volume stood at more than $44.7 billion as of Tuesday, while its market capitalization is third among cryptos after Bitcoin and Ethereum, according to data from the digital asset price-tracking website, CoinMarketCap.