A UK police force is looking to return £16 million ($22 million) in stolen cryptocurrency, including a whopping £6.85 million ($9.4 million) in Ethereum recovered from a single encrypted USB drive.
Greater Manchester Police’s Economic Crime Unit retrieved the cryptocurrency after smashing an online scam. According to a press release from the force, the scam saw victims from the UK, U.S., Europe, China, Australia, and Hong Kong duped into depositing money into an online savings and trading service that purported to be built on Binance Smart Chain.
Instead, the scammers waited until a “significant amount of money” had been deposited before diverting the funds into their own cryptocurrency wallets and shutting down the website.
After receiving intelligence that the perpetrators of the scheme had been in Manchester, the police arrested a 23-year-old male and a 25-year-old female for fraud and money laundering offenses. The pair have since been released under investigation.
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