Crypto Love Scams: US Treasury vs. Burmese Militia in Pig-Butchering Showdown 🐷💸

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Somewhere between the smoky salons of Rangoon and the marble monotony of Washington, the Karen National Army has been informed—no doubt by telegram, under candlelight—that the United States Department of the Treasury holds them in ill repute. It seems these enterprising gentlemen have been orchestrating crypto scams with a verve that would make a Wall Street banker blush.

The Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, presumably leaning back in faux-leather chairs, let slip the news on 5 May. Apparently, the KNA stands at the spider’s heart of a digital web so sophisticated, one wonders if they receive technical support from Bond villains. Their pièce de rĂŠsistance? The “pig butchering” scam—a name at once grotesque and oddly culinary, recalling fond memories of prep school roast dinners and emotional cruelty.

The modus operandi is heartbreakingly simple. Hapless romantics, trawling the digital seas of dating apps and social media, are wooed with the promise of exotic investments and, perhaps, true love. Appeals grow intimate. Wallets open, then gape ever wider. At the appointed hour, the KNA absconds, the lover vanishes, and one is left contemplating existential questions in a cryptocurrency sub-forum. Sic transit gloria laundered bitcoin.

The operation’s next act takes us to Cambodia, land of temples and—if the Treasury is to be believed—laundromats of the future. Here, the Huione Group flourishes, gliding through regulatory gestures like a debutante at her first ball. Uncle Sam has recently labeled them a “primary money laundering concern”—which, for those keeping score, rates just above “mildly suspicious” and just below “Bond villain lair.”

Huione, with its myriad subsidiaries, offers everything a discerning criminal could need: Huione Pay, Huione Crypto, and even a “Telegram-based black market” rebranded as Haowang Guarantee. (New name, same questionable aftertaste.) The group reportedly moved $4 billion—a sum large enough to buy a football club or, more relevantly, several offshore islands. Even North Korea’s Lazarus Group is alleged to be a customer; one imagines them all at a gala, raising champagne toasts to untraceable stablecoins as FinCEN, ever the wallflower, disapproves quietly from the corner.

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2025-05-06 17:02