Crypto giant Circle rebuffed efforts to help scam victims, police say

As law enforcement officials around the country grapple with a flood of victims falling prey to scammers using cryptocurrency, authorities in two states say that the crypto giant Circle has snubbed court orders directing the firm to recover stolen funds.

Circle pitches its USDC token, a so-called stablecoin pegged to the US dollar, as the new face of finance. The $17-billion firm is the second largest stablecoin issuer and has touted partnerships with Visa, Mastercard and global banks, as well as its work with police to tackle sophisticated scams.

But some officials, who often rely on stablecoin issuers to fight illicit activity, have begun to raise alarms about instances of Circle denying law enforcement requests to freeze assets and allegedly refusing to help recover victim funds.

The tools that are at our disposal are not keeping up with the tools the criminals are using,

— Wisconsin prosecutor Thomas Binger

Frustrations boiled over recently in a county in southeastern Wisconsin, where state prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against Circle, alleging the company refused to comply with a warrant ordering it to recover a scam victim’s stolen assets. Although the complaint lists a single misdemeanor count, it is highly unusual for a state prosecutor to level a criminal charge against a major financial firm like Circle, according to Karen Greenway, a former FBI agent and financial crime expert.

In a filing last week, Circle called the Wisconsin complaint meritless and said it should be dismissed. Circle maintains it did not have the technical capability to comply with the order and that prosecutors did not engage with the company’s attempt to find alternatives for compensating the victim. Circle also asserted that the Wisconsin court did not have jurisdiction to issue the order.

The case’s prosecutor, Thomas Binger, said that prosecutors are struggling against criminals who use cryptocurrency’s anonymity to move illicit funds beyond their reach.

“The tools that are at our disposal are not keeping up with the tools the criminals are using,” Binger said. “It’s made it very difficult to identify the perpetrator behind these transactions and bring them to justice.”

Criminals often use stablecoins to move stolen funds. In December, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists’ Coin Laundry project revealed that the Huione Group, a financial conglomerate based in Cambodia, relied on the stablecoin issued by Tether to move at least $1.4 billion, including after the United States named Huione a money laundering organization. A spokesperson for Tether, the world’s largest stablecoin issuer, told ICIJ in an emailed statement at the time that the company “unequivocally condemns the illegal use of stablecoins and is fully committed to combating illicit activity.”

Racing against the blockchain

The Wisconsin case follows a letter prosecutors in New York State sent U.S. Senators in January expressing multiple frustrations with Circle. First, prosecutors said that Circle has denied law enforcement requests to freeze its USDC tokens without a court order.

Stablecoin transactions can take just seconds, far less time than obtaining a court order. Freezing funds means the suspected criminal can no longer move the crypto out of their digital wallet or convert those funds to cash. Getting companies like Circle to remotely freeze funds is a crucial first step in trying to get that money back to victims.

In a blog post from earlier this year, Circle said it freezes tokens only when compelled through a “lawful process”, a policy intended to protect users from “arbitrary or politically motivated interference.” This stands in contrast to Tether, which grants some requests from law enforcement even without a court order. Tether told ICIJ that it has “helped freeze about $4.7 billion in assets connected to illicit activity.”

Scott Simons, a police detective in Milwaukee County who consulted on the case that led to the criminal complaint against Circle, says he’s seen more than a dozen cases around the country in which Circle either declined a law enforcement request to freeze victim funds or where a court order to compel the company to freeze victim funds was obtained too late to stop fund flows.

A company that said it can’t comply

In their letter to Congress, New York prosecutors also asserted that Circle did not honor court orders seeking to return stolen funds to victims — the issue at the heart of the Wisconsin complaint.

Because Circle keeps interest-yielding assets on hand to back up its digital tokens, frozen assets can in fact be lucrative, according to the letter from New York officials.

“Circle’s motive for not assisting law enforcement becomes crystal clear: it is financially preferable to only freeze cryptocurrency deemed to have been stolen, but not return the underlying asset to law enforcement or any fraud victim, because Circle can continue to collect the interest through investment of the underlying funds,” the letter said. Circle currently has at least 119 million USDC tokens frozen, according to blockchain researcher Yury Serov.

The Wisconsin case dates back to around May of last year when a Walworth County resident identified only as “Victim #1” received an unsolicited text message from a person calling herself Lenora, according to court records. “Lenora” led the man to believe they were in a relationship and, touting her investment prowess, directed him to convert part of his savings to USDC and deposit it into a bogus investment platform.

Last August, a Walworth County court ordered Circle to freeze the approximately 381,000 stolen USDC, which had been transferred to a private crypto wallet. Circle immediately complied and froze the funds.

Then in early December, a Wisconsin judge signed a warrant ordering Circle to “facilitate the seizure” of the stolen USDC. After Circle denied it could, state prosecutors filed the complaint, alleging that Circle “did intentionally disobey, resist, or obstruct” the court.

The warrant ordered Circle to invalidate the frozen tokens in the suspect wallet and transfer an equal amount of new USDC to a wallet owned by the Walworth County Sheriff’s Office.

In its filing last week, Circle asserted that Wisconsin prosecutors wrongly portrayed the company as willfully disobeying an order. Circle maintained it simply did not have the “ability to invalidate and reissue such USDC.”

But several crypto experts questioned Circle’s previous claims of technological helplessness when it comes to recovering victim funds. For example, Tether’s software allows it to destroy, or “burn”, its tokens in illicit wallets and the firm is known to then reissue an equal amount of new tokens to law enforcement, effectively returning stolen funds. In a response to questions from ICIJ, Tether said it has reissued $1.1 billion worth of its tokens that were “obtained illicitly through various financial crime typologies.”

Joshua Cooper-Duckett, a cryptocurrency tracing expert with the firm Cryptoforensic Investigators, told ICIJ that Circle could simply update code that helps govern its tokens to allow this type of token burning. The company frequently relies on “the excuse of not being able to burn and reissue,” said Cooper-Duckett, who has worked on civil cases where victims have sought to recover USDC tokens.

Circle did not respond to a question on whether it could update its software to allow token burning in third-party wallets.

In a footnote to its Wisconsin court filing, Circle said that it had recently come to a general agreement with federal prosecutors on “a mechanism for compensating victims” where certain USDC funds could be permanently frozen. That could take them out of circulation forever. New tokens of an equal value would then apparently be reissued to victims. The process could have essentially the same outcome as doing a “burn and reissue” on tokens.

Circle did not respond to questions on whether it could apply that method in the Wisconsin case, and declined to say whether its arrangement with the Justice Department was laid out in a binding settlement agreement.

At least up until now, Simons said, the firm has offered little help in recovering stolen funds.

“They just are telling agencies that it’s impossible,” Simons said. “So the detective tells the victim, ‘Sorry, we’re kind of out of luck.’”