Most recently, the United States has announced imposing sanctions on Funnull Technologies along with its administrator, Liu Lizhi. The Department of the Treasury Office of Foreign Assets Control said on May 29, 2025, that it has sanctioned a Known Philippine company that provides computer infrastructure for hundreds of thousands of websites involved in virtual currency investment scams, commonly known as “pig butchering.”
The press release by OFAC reads that American losses of billions of dollars in these frauds will reach a record level in 2024. It also says that Funnull has directly facilitated many of these schemes, resulting in losses of $200 million to U.S residents.
Michael Faulkender, the deputy secretary of the treasury, said, “ Today’s action underscores our focus on disrupting the criminal enterprises, like Funnull, that enable these cyber scams and deprive Americans of their hard-earned savings”.
In continuation, he said, “The United States is strongly committed to ensuring the continued growth of a legitimate, safe, and secure digital asset ecosystem, including the use of virtual currencies and similar technologies.”
The information of this sanction was revealed on X post of OFAC account, which also quotes that “ Funnull has directly facilitated several of these schemes, resulting in over $200 million in U.S. victim-reported losses.”
Allegedly, the company purchased IP addresses in large quantities from cloud service providers. After that, it sold them to online criminals. These criminals hosted harmful information and scam websites on the infrastructure.
Pig butchering turned into one of the haunting scams in crypto
Pig butchering scams have developed to be a significant problem in the crypto space, resulting in significant emotional and financial losses.
Scammers use dating apps, social media, or random texts to gain victims’ confidence over weeks or months before tricking them into investing in phony crypto platforms, combining romance or friendship scams.
Alone in 2024, the total amount went out of the market due to the effect of pig butchering was reported to be just close to $10 billion, and the FBI has reported 4,500 victims of this tactic in the United States.
A resident of Massachusetts lost $400,000 in a romance scam, yet the amount was later seized by the authorities and probably returned to the victim.
Crypto market price updates
When writing, the crypto market cap was $3.33 trillion with a loss of 3.14% in the past 24 hours, and trading volume is $149 billion with a surge of over 18%. Experts term this spike in volume as the increasing selling pressure.
The crypto fear and greed index has demonstrated a fade in greed and an increase in fear, and is at 61. Over 48 hours, Bitcoin tumbled and lost 3.02% of its price, reaching $105,768.
According to the data from CoinMarketCap, the intraday gainers list has been ruled by DeXe, Lido, and Kucoin Token, and the losers are Raydium, Pancakeswap, Bonk, and Fartcoin.
