The U.S. Department of Justice announced that Chinese nationals Daren Li and Yicheng Zhang were apprehended and indicted for leading a pig butchering scheme that allegedly resulted in the laundering of at least $73 million, The Hacker News reports.
Such funds obtained from a global cryptocurrency investment scam were laundered by Li and Zhang's co-conspirators from U.S. banks to accounts at Bahamas-based Deltec bank before being converted to cryptocurrency and then sent to various cryptocurrency wallets, according to the Justice Department.
Li and Zhang could be jailed for up to 20 years for charges of conspiracy to commit money laundering and each of the six counts of international money laundering.
Such an announcement comes a month after Shenzhen- and Hong Kong-based app developers were sued by Google for the development of fraudulent cryptocurrency apps proliferating the Play Store and months after the four U.S. nationals were charged by the federal government for their role in an over $80 million pig butchering cryptocurrency scam.
