Bezalel Eithan Raviv is the co-founder of Lionsgate Network, a blockchain analysis firm in Israel. The company helps governments, corporations and individuals around the world go after malicious crypto funding or recover lost funds. He said recovering money from crypto scammers is hypercomplex.
“It’s like when you break an egg,” Raviv said. “Everything was contained beautifully before. Once you broke it, ask me to bring it back together. It requires skills.”
One of the most recent crypto scams Raviv could recall came out of Dallas. A Dallasite got tricked into pressing a link for a supposed moneymaking campaign. “Everyone wants to press those today with inflation, prices are high, people need more money to end the month,” Raviv said. This Dallasite was asked to invest as little as $250 into what Raviv called “a clean cut dummy platform,” a fake platform for trading cryptocurrency. “He was seeing profits, incredible profits, on the screen, not knowing that it’s all smoke and mirrors.”
The Dallasite eventually saw through the scam, but only after throwing $500,000 into the fake platform. “That was everything he had,” Raviv said. “That is incredible, but it’s not original.”
According to the FBI internet crime report last year, cryptocurrency investment scam losses rose from $2.57 billion in 2022 to $3.94 billion in 2023. “These scams are designed to entice those targeted with the promise of lucrative returns on their investments,” the FBI report said. In 2023, the FBI received 43,653 complaints about crimes involving cryptocurrency. Another 25,815 complaints concerned cryptocurrency wallet crimes. The FBI report does not break down crypto crimes by state but it found that Texans sent in more than 47,000 complaints related to internet crimes. They amounted to over a billion dollars in losses for Texans, according to the report.
Even worse, Raviv has heard stories of people who hired recovery firms that turned out to be scams themselves. “What we see here is basically a huge operation of financial terrorism around the world that has two main motives,” he said. “One is for profit and the other is actually nations going after tier-one countries, such as the U.S., the UK, Australia, Germany, France. So, basically, we’re seeing that there is, behind the scenes, a lot of the crime in crypto; its birthplace are countries that are of the triangle of China, Iran and Russia. So, there’s more to it than the eye actually meets.”
“He was seeing profits, incredible profits, on the screen, not knowing that it’s all smoke and mirrors.” – Bezalel Eithan Raviv, Lionsgate Network
Raviv said the company also works with police departments on cases involving crypto. “They basically consider crypto as a big headache because of the anonymity around it,” Raviv said. “So, basically, they relinquish the cases very quickly after they’re being reported. And we kind of help to be that middle company, middle person, to offer the evidence, which will basically get them to act on behalf of our clients.”
Jesse Carr, a spokesperson for the Dallas Police Department, said its financial crimes unit investigates all cryptocurrency scams that are reported to the department. “The unit works closely with federal partners to thoroughly investigate these types of cases because many times they can cross state and federal jurisdictions,” Carr said by email. “Since January 2023, the Dallas Police Department has investigated about 30 cases specifically involving cryptocurrency.”
Raviv said crypto scams can be broken down into four kinds: fake trading platforms, pig butchering scams, wallet hacks and fake recovery services.
