US Sanctions Philippine Company for Supporting Crypto Scams

The US Treasury Department US has slapped sanctions on Funnull Technology for providing support to cryptocurrency investment scams.

The US Treasury Department on Thursday announced sanctions against a Philippines-based company for providing infrastructure to hundreds of thousands of websites involved in cryptocurrency investment fraud (CIF) scams.

The sanctions were announced against Funnull Technology Inc., and its administrator, Liu Lizhi, for facilitating CIF schemes that let to more than $200 million in losses to US victims, the department said.

Also referred to as ‘pig butchering’, these types of scams rely on fictitious identities and elaborate storylines to gain the intended victims’ trust, convince them to invest in virtual assets on fake platforms, and steal their money.

Funnull is accused of purchasing IP addresses in bulk from major cloud providers and then sells them to cybercriminals to host their scam sites and other malicious content.

The company uses domain generation algorithms (DGAs ...