Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez announced Friday that his Virtual Currency Unit has dismantled a cryptocurrency scam targeting artists across the United States.
The investigation, led by a team from the DA’s office, began after an 85-year-old Brooklyn painter was defrauded of his life savings, traced the scheme to Nigeria and identified 40 fraudulent NFT marketplace websites. Those domains have now been seized to prevent further victimization, the DA’s office said in a press release.
“Cryptocurrency scams can take many forms but have similar characteristics, such as preying on vulnerable victims and requesting fees to redeem purported earnings,” DA Gonzalez said. “These were the tactics used in this case, leading our investigators to a network of fraudulent websites that specifically scammed artists. It is my hope that by shutting these domains and raising awareness about this scheme, we will prevent others from falling victim to this scam.”
The probe began in May when the children of a Clinton Hill resident reported their father’s financial and emotional devastation. The professional painter had been contacted via LinkedIn by an alleged art dealer claiming to represent “OpenSea/Private Mint,” a counterfeit version of the legitimate NFT marketplace OpenSea.
The scammer convinced the victim to sign a contract to mint his art as NFTs. The scammer later claimed the NFTs had generated $300,000 in bitcoin but required him to pay fees to access the proceeds. The painter liquidated his IRA, maxed out credit cards, and took out a loan to send over $135,000 in cryptocurrency to the fake platform.
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The fraud unraveled when the promised payout never materialized, leaving the victim financially ruined.
The Virtual Currency Unit traced the victim’s payments to accounts at a cryptocurrency exchange. The funds were primarily converted to Nigerian currency, making recovery impossible. Investigators linked the scam to a network of 40 fake NFT marketplace websites, some of which tricked users into entering their cryptocurrency wallet seed phrases, allowing scammers to drain entire accounts.
Though the stolen funds could not be recovered, the DA’s office obtained court orders to seize the 40 fraudulent domains. The sites now redirect to a seizure notice warning users of the scam.
“This scheme targeted artists nationwide and exploited their trust in emerging digital markets,” Gonzalez said. “By taking these sites offline, we are stopping future harm and educating the public.”
The DA’s office provided tips for avoiding similar scams:
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Verify the legitimacy of art dealers and NFT marketplaces.
Only use trusted NFT platforms and avoid sites requiring high upfront fees.
Never share your cryptocurrency wallet seed phrase.
XRP could soar higher if a new crypto summer begins.
XRP(XRP 4.22%), the native token of the XRP Ledger, lost more than 40% of its value over the past 12 months. It’s still a speculative altcoin that could stay volatile for the foreseeable future, but it might be worth a modest $50 bet right now for a few simple reasons.
What is XRP?
The founders of Ripple Labs, a fintech company that specializes in blockchain-based payments, launched XRP in 2012 after pre-minting its entire supply of 100 billion tokens. It can’t be actively mined like Bitcoin (BTC 0.75%) or staked like Ethereum(ETH 4.53%).
Image source: Getty Images.
Instead, XRP is mainly used as a bridge currency to accelerate transactions across Ripple’s network as a faster alternative to traditional SWIFT transfers. In 2020, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) sued Ripple for selling its own XRP tokens — allegedly as unlicensed securities — to fund its own expansion. That lawsuit caused Ripple to lose many of its top customers and drove the top crypto exchanges to delist XRP.
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Why is XRP worth buying again?
Last August, the SEC lawsuit finally concluded with a lighter-than-expected fine for Ripple. The court also ruled that it wasn’t an unlicensed security when purchased by retail investors. That ruling prompted major crypto exchanges to relist XRP, and the first spot price exchange-traded funds (ETFs) for XRP were approved and launched in late 2025.
Moreover, Ripple recently submitted its application for a U.S. bank charter, and its expansion into a full-fledged bank could support increased use of XRP as a bridge currency. Ripple has already been using XRP as a bridge currency to support cross-border transactions for its own stablecoin, Ripple USD(RLUSD 0.01%), which was launched in late 2024.
The XRP Ledger has also launched a sidechain compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) for developing decentralized apps (dApps). Those connections could support the usage of XRP in more decentralized finance (DeFi) applications.
The broader cryptocurrency market, which was throttled by stubbornly high Treasury yields and other macro headwinds over the past year, could also recover over the next few months. When that happens, more investors should rotate back into riskier assets, such as XRP.
Today’s Change
(-4.22%) $-0.08
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Current Price
$1.73
Key Data Points
Market Cap
$105B
Day’s Range
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$1.72 – $1.81
52wk Range
$1.65 – $3.65
Volume
5B
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A $50 investment in XRP’s earliest trade in 2013 would still be worth nearly $14,700 today. I doubt it can replicate those massive gains over the next decade as the altcoin market tightens up, but it could be a smart place to park a few dollars if a new crypto summer begins.
Leo Sun has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Ethereum, and XRP. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
Strive completed a major bitcoin treasury financing, retiring legacy debt, expanding preferred equity funding and rapidly growing its bitcoin holdings as institutional demand fueled a balance sheet built for long-duration digital asset exposure.
Six senators accused Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche this week of having a conflict of interest when he shut down investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges and eliminated an enforcement team dedicated to looking for crypto-related fraud and money-laundering schemes.
A letter written by Democratic Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin and Mazie Hirono and signed by Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse, Christopher Coons and Richard Blumenthal cited a ProPublica investigation that revealed Blanche owned at least $159,000 worth of crypto-related assets when he ordered an end to the work.
Durbin, Hirono, Whitehouse, Coons and Blumenthal serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which oversees the Justice Department.
The same senators previously sent a letter to Blanche raising concerns that his actions would help President Donald Trump’s financial interests in cryptocurrency. In their letter sent on Wednesday, they said Blanche’s actions appeared to violate the federal conflict of interest law.
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“Last year, we asked for the rationale behind your puzzling decision to scale back the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) cryptocurrency enforcement efforts and urged you to reconsider. We write now in light of recent reporting that you held substantial amounts of cryptocurrency at the time you made this decision,” the senators wrote. “At the very least, you had a glaring conflict of interest and should have recused yourself.”
Blanche, the second-highest-ranking official at the Justice Department, signed an ethics agreement in February promising to dump his cryptocurrency within 90 days of his confirmation and not to participate in any matter that could have a “direct and predictable effect on my financial interests in the virtual currency” until his bitcoin and other crypto-related products were sold.
But on April 7, before he divested, he issued a memo titled “Ending Regulation by Prosecution” that halted investigations launched under President Joe Biden. In the memo, Blanche condemned the Biden Justice Department’s tough approach toward crypto as “a reckless strategy of regulation by prosecution, which was ill conceived and poorly executed.” The memo disbanded the agency’s National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, which had won several high-profile crypto-related convictions. Blanche said the agency would instead target only the terrorists and drug traffickers who illicitly used crypto, not the platforms that hosted them.
Days later, the six senators urged Blanche to reconsider, contending that his decision would otherwise help support sanctions evasion, drug trafficking, scams and child exploitation.
In their latest letter, they said their concerns had been realized. They cited an independent report that found there was a surge in illicit cryptocurrency activities in 2025, including crimes tied to money laundering and human trafficking. They also questioned Blanche’s reasons for the policy shift.
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“Certainly, President Trump’s financial interests seem to have motivated some of his pardons of criminals convicted of cryptocurrency-related crimes,” their letter stated. “But the fact that you held substantial amounts of cryptocurrency at the time you made this decision calls into question your own motivations.”
A Justice Department spokesperson told ProPublica last week that Blanche’s crypto orders were “appropriately flagged, addressed and cleared in advance.” She did not elaborate or respond to questions asking who cleared his actions. The department did not respond this week to requests for comment about the senators’ criticism.
In this week’s letter, the six Democratic senators issued a series of questions demanding details about how and when Blanche’s actions were cleared and by whom.
They also asked Blanche to, no later than Feb. 11, provide any written determination he received about the legality of his crypto enforcement action; all his communications with ethics and Justice Department officials about the issue; and any communications he had with the crypto industry prior to issuing his April memo.
Their demands come approximately a week after the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan government watchdog group, asked the Justice Department’s inspector general to investigate Blanche. Kedric Payne, the group’s general counsel and senior director of ethics, alleged that Blanche’s orders violated the law because they benefited the industry broadly, including his own investments. Payne estimated that the value of Blanche’s bitcoin holdings alone rose by 34%, to $105,881.53, between when he issued the memo and when he divested. At the time he issued the memo, Blanche also held investments in several other cryptocurrencies, including Solana and Ethereum, and stock holdings in Coinbase.
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Under the federal conflicts-of-interest statute, government officials are forbidden from taking part in a “particular matter” that can financially benefit them or their immediate family unless they have a special waiver from the government. The penalties range from up to one year in jail or a civil fine of up to $50,000 all the way to as much as five years in prison if someone willfully violates the law.
“The public has a right to know that decisions are being made in the public’s best interest and not to benefit a government employee’s financial interests,” Payne wrote in his complaint to the inspector general.
Blanche, a former federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York, was Trump’s lead attorney in the Manhattan trial that resulted in his being convicted of 34 felonies stemming from a hush-money payment to a porn actress, Stormy Daniels. Blanche also defended Trump against criminal charges accusing him of conspiring to subvert the 2020 election and retaining highly classified documents. (Those two cases were dropped after Trump was reelected president.)
Payne’s group expanded its investigation request on Wednesday, asking the Office of Government Ethics and the Justice Department’s ethics officer to look into whether Blanche violated his ethics agreement, the federal conflicts-of-interest statute and the federal law prohibiting false statements on compliance forms.
