US sanctions Filipino company behind pig-butchering tech
The US Treasury has sanctioned Funnull Technology, the Philippines-based computer firm behind hundreds of thousands of crypto scamming websites responsible for over $200 million in US victim losses.
The sanctions, made possible with help from the FBI, also target the company’s administrator Liu Lizhi and two crypto addresses, one ether (ETH) and one tron (TRX), associated with Funnull Technology.
The US claims Funnull Technology facilitates thousands of crypto-related scams, such as pig butchering, by buying IP addresses in bulk from cloud hosting businesses and selling them on to cybercriminals.
These domain names are intentionally similar to each other and “make it easier for cybercriminals to impersonate trusted brands when creating scam websites.”
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The US Treasury claims that cybercriminals can then “quickly change to different domain names and IP addresses when legitimate providers attempt to take the websites down.”
Since January this year, the FBI claims to have found 548 “Funnull Canonical Names” linked to over 332,000 unique domains. The Treasury also claims that the average loss to these crypto scams is over $150,000 and “likely underestimates the total losses.”
Funnull Technology and the operations it serves are just the latest examples of a crypto-related scam enterprise based in Southeast Asia, a region that’s seen scam compounds defended with militias and filled with kidnapped slaves.
Last week, a key figure in a cryptocurrency scam that’s believed to have stolen over $300 million from victims was arrested by Vietnamese police.
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