Vietnamese Man Charged in $53M Pig Butchering Scam

Highlights

Trung Nguyen Van, 37, a Vietnamese national, faces two federal money-laundering counts
His crypto wallets received roughly $53.3 million between February 2018 and December 2024
One Missouri victim alone lost about $16 million to a fake trading app called “Triangle”
The case lands amid a record year of US enforcement against Southeast Asia-based scam networks

Federal prosecutors have charged a Vietnamese national with laundering tens of millions of dollars stolen through romance-based cryptocurrency fraud. The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Missouri announced on September 25, 2026 that Trung Nguyen Van, 37, made his initial court appearance in Los Angeles on two counts of money laundering, in a case prosecutors say stretched from February 2018 to December 2024.

According to the charges, Van’s cryptocurrency wallets took in approximately $53,275,939 in digital assets traced back to wire fraud schemes that targeted victims across the United States. Investigators describe a familiar “pig butchering” pattern: scammers cultivate a fake romance through dating apps, text messages or social media, then steer the relationship toward an investment pitch and a fraudulent trading platform built to look legitimate.

In this case, the platform was called “Triangle.” Victims who deposited crypto were shown fabricated dashboards displaying rapidly climbing paper profits, an incentive prosecutors say pushed them to deposit larger sums before the operators cut off access to the funds. Between June and August 2024, one Missouri-based victim was drawn into the platform and ultimately lost around $16 million. Court records cite a string of transfers on August 7, 2024, when more than $569,000 moved directly into Van’s wallet, followed two days later by six additional victim-linked transfers totaling a similar amount. Prosecutors allege the funds were then broken into smaller transactions, close to $568,000 across four separate transfers, and pushed into private wallets in an apparent effort to evade detection.

U.S. Attorney R. Matthew Price framed the case as part of a much larger pattern of fraud reaching American victims from overseas:

“Pig butchering schemes are an increasingly prevalent and sophisticated form of fraud that have caused billions of dollars in losses.”

FBI Special Agent in Charge Chris Ormerod added that the bureau remains committed to “protecting the American public and holding fraudsters accountable,” language that echoes a broader escalation in US enforcement this year. A dedicated Scam Center Strike Force, stood up in November 2025 to dismantle scam-compound infrastructure across Myanmar, Cambodia and Laos, has already recovered $580 million in digital assets tied to pig butchering networks and helped seize $61 million in Tether specifically linked to these schemes. Those figures sit alongside the DOJ’s record $15 billion bitcoin forfeiture from a Cambodia-based operation, the largest single forfeiture action in the department’s history, and 276 arrests logged across 2026 enforcement actions. Chainalysis estimates crypto-enabled scams generated more than $17 billion in losses globally in 2025 alone, underscoring why romance-investment fraud has become a standing priority for federal prosecutors rather than a one-off case.

The Van case is a smaller dollar figure than some of the headline seizures, but it follows the same enforcement playbook that has produced this year’s biggest actions, including the Justice Department’s ongoing sanctions-related scrutiny of exchanges detailed in its Binance Iran sanctions probe. It also lands in a year where the human cost of scam networks has extended well beyond financial loss, as seen in the wave of abductions covered in France’s crypto kidnapping cases, and where retail investors keep getting funneled into fraudulent schemes through channels as mundane as fake AI trading bot tutorials on YouTube.

Van’s case now moves toward pretrial proceedings in Missouri federal court. Prosecutors have not indicated whether additional defendants tied to the “Triangle” platform will be charged, though the strike force’s pattern this year suggests the wallet-tracing work behind this case is unlikely to end with a single arrest.