A Vietnamese national has been charged in connection with a pig butchering crypto scam that prosecutors say funnelled more than $53 million through his cryptocurrency wallets, with a single victim losing $16 million to a fake investment platform called ‘Triangle’. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri announced the charges on 25 September, according to KCTV5.
Trung Nguyen Van, 37, entered the United States through the San Ysidro, California pedestrian border crossing from Mexico on 22 September. He was arrested two days later at Los Angeles International Airport before boarding a flight to Taiwan. He now faces two counts of money laundering.
How the pig butchering crypto scam operated
The scheme followed the now-familiar pig butchering playbook. Victims were contacted online, cultivated over time, and eventually persuaded to move funds into what appeared to be legitimate cryptocurrency investment platforms. The Department of Justice said each victim ‘was guided by an individual they met online to invest cryptocurrency in a specified website with a promise of high financial returns.’ None were able to withdraw their money.
In Van’s case, one victim transferred approximately $16 million in cryptocurrency between June and August 2024, believing the funds were going into the ‘Triangle’ investment platform. They were not. After collecting the transfers, Van moved the assets to a private, unhosted crypto wallet outside the centralised blockchain network, making recovery significantly harder.
Court documents show the charges are part of a broader wire fraud investigation involving more than $125 million in cryptocurrency. TradingView News reports that Van’s wallets received approximately $53.3 million in assets linked to wire-fraud schemes and subsequently transferred roughly $53.2 million onward to other accounts off the centralised network. At least $24 million of the incoming funds were linked to known pig butchering schemes.
The Department of Justice set out the timeline in stark terms: ‘From Feb. 9, 2018, through Dec. 17, 2024, Van’s cryptocurrency wallets received approximately $53,275,939 in cryptocurrency assets from wire fraud schemes targeting United States citizens.’
A billion-dollar problem for US authorities
Van’s arrest sits inside a much larger crisis. The FBI said in its 2025 Internet Crime Report that Americans lost almost $21 billion to cyber-enabled crimes last year. Investment scams accounted for 49% of all scam-related incidents and produced $8.6 billion in losses alone.
Pig butchering scams, also described as cryptocurrency investment scams or romance baiting, typically begin on social media, dating sites or messaging apps. Fraudsters build a relationship with a target over days or weeks before steering them towards a fraudulent investment platform. Once the victim deposits funds, the money disappears into crypto accounts controlled by the scammers. The victim’s apparent ‘profits’ are simply numbers on a screen, designed to encourage further deposits until the scheme is wound up and the fraudsters vanish.
The scale of the networks behind these schemes has pushed US federal prosecutors to act more aggressively. In February, a Chinese national was sentenced to 20 years in prison in absentia for his role in an international pig butchering operation that defrauded victims of more than $73 million. That case came months after US federal authorities established a dedicated task force, the Scam Center Strike Force, targeting Chinese cryptocurrency scam networks.
Van’s case, run out of the Western District of Missouri, suggests prosecutors are casting a wider net geographically and are willing to pursue defendants who move through US borders rather than operating entirely from abroad. Van’s path through the San Ysidro crossing and his subsequent appearance at Los Angeles International Airport gave authorities a clean intercept point before he could leave the country. His next court appearance will determine whether the two money laundering counts proceed to trial.
