The Justice Department on Tuesday said it has seized infrastructure tied to what officials called one of the world’s most prolific criminal marketplaces, used to commit cyber scams and other crimes.

The seized cloud computing account hosted backend infrastructure used by subsidiaries of the Huione Group, a Cambodia-based corporate conglomerate.

At the same time, the Treasury Department announced fresh sanctions and more against Huione and affiliated companies. The administration actions Tuesday add to disruption efforts from last fall against pieces of the same network.

The Trump administration has placed an emphasis on combating transnational cybercrime and other kinds of scams and fraud.

The seized cloud computing account was used to operate Huione Guarantee, also known as Haowang Guarantee, according to Tuesday’s DOJ announcement.

“The Huione Group used this cloud computing account as part of a technological backbone that allowed billions in fraud proceeds to be transferred, moved, and concealed — much of it stolen through Southeast Asian scam centers,” said Tysen Duva, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “Seizures of these marketplaces is critical in the fight against fraud that affects so many Americans, and to stop avenues for criminal proceeds to be laundered.”

U.S. officials allege that Huione Guarantee operated Telegram channels with discussions about illicit goods and services, including the sale of stolen credit card and sensitive personal information, malware-enabled thefts, human trafficking schemes and the laundering of money from romance and investment scams. Huione Guarantee also allegedly offered escrow services for criminals such as money launderers for cryptocurrency.

Treasury took two steps Tuesday to build on its move in October to sever Huione Group from the U.S. financial system. One was to tack H-Pay Service onto its rule for Huione Group as a successor entity. And it slapped nine people and 26 entities linked to Prince Group with sanctions.

“Huione Group served as a critical node for laundering proceeds of cyber heists and virtual currency investment scams and was used by the Prince Group to transfer and consolidate scam-derived assets,” Treasury’s announcement states.

Also last October, the Justice Department said it seized bitcoin valued at $15 billion from the chairman of the Prince Group, Chen Zhi, and indicted him over alleged cryptocurrency crimes and other schemes. 

An alleged key figure in Chen’s criminal network has been arrested in Cambodia and extradited to China.

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Silent Ransom Group, a long-running data extortion operation, continues to hit U.S.-based law firms by impersonating IT support and, in some cases, visiting victims in person to gain physical access to computers, the FBI said in an alert Tuesday.

The closed group, which likely operates from Russia and emerged in 2022 after Conti disbanded, has claimed responsibility for more than 100 attacks with activity surging during the past few months, according to researchers.

The FBI’s warning comes exactly one year after the agency released a previous alert about Silent Ransom Group consistently targeting law firms since mid-2023. The group doesn’t deploy encryption, but its dual use of social engineering and in-person visits for data theft is extremely rare with no known parallels across the vast cybercrime ecosystem, multiple experts told CyberScoop.

“There were probably a lot of times that this failed before it started succeeding because there’s a lot of trial-and-error involved,” said Allan Liska, field chief information security officer at Recorded Future. Whereas other ransomware groups would rather move on to other tactics or targets, “Silent Ransom Group has seen the value especially in going after law firms, and so they’re willing to put the extra effort into it,” he added. 

The data extortion group, which is also tracked as Chatty Spider, UNC3753 and Storm-0252, isn’t as prolific as more high-tempo ransomware groups. Yet, it’s having a noticeable impact due to its proven knack for attacking organizations in the legal sector.

Halcyon tracked 134 ransomware incidents against law firms and legal services during the first quarter of this year, making it the fourth-most targeted industry accounting for more than 6% of all ransomware attacks the company tracked during the period. 

Silent Ransom Group and Inc, a ransomware-as-a-service operation dating back to mid-2023, are largely responsible for that uptick, said Cynthia Kaiser, senior vice president at Halycon’s Ransomware Research Center.

“Silent was the first group to really just be targeting law firms, and they’ve targeted major law firms” with a clear understanding of what’s most problematic for organizations in that segment, she added. “The theft of data in and of itself is the biggest issue for the law firms, so they’re tailoring a lot of their operations around what they know about the sector.”

Law firms are a rich target because data theft creates huge privilege and reputational problems, which creates the perception they might be more willing to pay high extortion demands, Kaiser said.

Silent Ransom Group’s social engineering scheme involves phone calls or phishing emails that urge employees to call one of the group’s associates posing as IT support, the FBI said. If the group’s attempt to gain access to the employee’s computer via remote access tools fails, it sends an associate to the victim’s location to physically attach a storage device to the victim’s workstation. 

This extra step is unique and places Silent Ransom Group in a completely different mode of operation than its peers in ransomware and data theft extortion. Some aggressive data theft extortion groups have harassed and threatened executives and employees with physical violence, but in-person visits for data theft are extraordinary.

“While Flashpoint has observed threat actors soliciting or co-opting both witting and unwitting insiders, we have not observed them physically sending attackers to victim locations. This tactic carries significant risk, as threat actors are able to use technology to obscure their real-world identities,” said Ian Gray, vice president of cyber threat intelligence operations at Flashpoint. 

Joe Slowik, director of cybersecurity alerting strategy at Dataminr, said it’s easy to question why potential victims would fall for this tactic. “However, humans in the workplace need to implicitly trust others to get their jobs done,” he said. 

“Questioning everything, while seemingly desirable, introduces significant friction and distrust in workplace environments and limits productivity in arbitrary ways,” Slowik added. “Criminal entities will continue to prey on human weaknesses and dependencies for success, and placing the burden solely on employees to defend against this is unfair and unreasonable.”

The FBI did not provide details about the people Silent Ransom Group uses to initiate the fake IT support calls or visit victims in person. Yet, with the group’s operators based in Russia, researchers speculate gig workers or subcontractors are playing a critical role by placing voice-based phishing calls in a common language and visiting victims at their workplace. 

Liska said he’s under the impression the group is using freelance taskers that don’t necessarily know they are committing a crime. “They may be suspicious, but you know, they need the money,” he said. 

“It’s kind of like a Doordash person that delivers Arby’s,” Liska said. “You know you’re doing really bad things to people, but you know what, they’re paying you to deliver.”

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Two New Jersey men were sentenced Wednesday for facilitating North Korea’s long-running scheme to plant operatives inside U.S. businesses as employees, generating more than $5 million in illicit revenue for the regime, the Justice Department said. 

The U.S. nationals — Kejia Wang, also known as Tony Wang, and Zhenxing Wang, also known as Danny Wang — were part of a years-long conspiracy that placed operatives in jobs at more than 100 U.S. companies, including many Fortune 500 companies, based in 27 states and the District of Columbia.

The elaborate scheme involved shell companies posing as software development firms, money laundering, and espionage with national security implications. Operatives involved in the conspiracy stole sensitive files from a California-based defense contractor related to U.S. military technology controlled under International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), officials said.

“Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) IT workers are not limited to revenue generation. When tasked, they can operationalize their placement and access to support strategic intelligence requirements, including intellectual property theft, network disruption or extortion,” Michael Barnhart, nation state investigator at DTEX, told CyberScoop.

While most of North Korea’s scheme is focused on revenue, it sometimes applies a dual-use approach, tasking certain privileged IT workers with malicious activity aiding other state-backed hacking groups, Barnhart added.

“Not all IT workers can be hackers but every North Korean hacker can or has been an IT worker,” he said. “This distinction matters for insider‑threat analysis because unlike typical fraudulent hires motivated by personal financial gain, IT workers can inflict national‑security‑level damage.”

Kejia Wang, 42, Zhenzing Wang, 39, and their co-conspirators stole the identities of at least 80 U.S. residents to facilitate the hiring of North Korean operatives and collected at least $696,000 in fees combined, officials said. U.S. victim companies also incurred legal fees, remediation costs and other damages and losses exceeding $3 million. 

Both men previously pleaded guilty to an assortment of crimes. Kejia Wang was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud, money laundering and identity theft. Zhenxing Wang was sentenced to 92 months in prison for conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud and money laundering. 

The pair were also ordered to forfeit a combined $600,000, of which two-thirds has already been paid, officials said.

The conspiracy, which ran from at least 2021 through October 2024, relied in part on shell companies — Hopana Tech, Tony WKJ and Independent Lab — the men set up to create the appearance of legitimate businesses. 

“Pairing a U.S. person, a U.S. address, and a front company such as Independent Lab, the facilitators created the illusion of a legitimate domestic effort allowing the IT workers to present themselves as U.S.-based without triggering suspicion during onboarding or daily workflows,” Barnhart said. 

“Front companies can act as that middle financial flow from victim companies back to DPRK units, which then pushes funds upward through the Workers’ Party of Korea to support whichever program the unit was aligned with, whether weapons development or domestic priorities,” he added. 

These front companies reflect a higher level of tradecraft that exploits a weak spot in insider risk assessments because threats aren’t always a malicious person trying to break into a network, Barnhart said. “Sometimes it looks like an entire company appearing clean on paper.”

Authorities have responded to North Korea’s scheme by targeting U.S.-based facilitators who provide forged or stolen identities and laptop farms for North Korean operatives, and seizing cryptocurrency linked to theft. 

Law enforcement wins are stacking up, but researchers warn that North Korea’s operation is massive and consistently evolving. 

The sentencing of Kejia Wang and Zhenxing Wang comes less than a month after a trio of American men were sentenced for similar crimes, including the operation of laptop farms, wire fraud and identity theft. 

The Justice and Treasury Departments have also issued indictments and sanctioned people and entities allegedly involved in North Korea’s effort to send thousands of specialized technical professionals outside of the country to secure jobs under false pretenses and funnel their wages back to Pyongyang.

You can read the full indictments against Kejia Wang and Zhenxing Wang below.

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Cybercrime remains a booming business. 

Annual cybercrime losses amounted to almost $20.9 billion last year, reflecting a 26% increase from 2024, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) said in its annual report Tuesday.

The comprehensive study exposes a worsening digital crime environment that is driving financial losses, with momentum moving in the wrong direction and compounding at an alarming rate. Annual cybercrime losses have jumped almost 400% from $4.2 billion in 2020, and cumulative losses in that five-year period surpassed $71.3 billion.

The FBI’s IC3, which formed as the country’s central hub for cybercrime reporting in 2000, is busier than ever. “We now average almost 3,000 complaints per day,” Jose Perez, the FBI’s operations director for its criminal and cyber branch, wrote in the report. 

The annual internet crime report highlights growing and sustaining trends. Yet, the scope of the study is limited and relies entirely on cybercrime incidents submitted to the FBI. 

The full impact of cybercrime remains murky, as an unknown number of victims suffer in the shadows and never report the crimes they endure.

The FBI received more than 1 million complaints last year, with victims aged over 60 reporting the largest amount of crimes that also resulted in the greatest amount of total losses by age group. Victims at least 60 years old filed 201,000 complaints with losses totaling nearly $7.75 billion, or about 37% of all cybercrime-related losses last year.

Investment-related fraud remained the largest component of cybercrime losses in 2025, reaching almost $8.65 billion. Business email compromise took the No. 2 spot with almost $3.05 billion in losses, followed by tech support scams at more than $2.1 billion. 

Cryptocurrency was the primary conduit for fraud linked to investment and tech support scams last year, while wire transfers composed the bulk of fraud resulting from business email compromise, according to the report.

Phishing was the most commonly reported type of cybercrime last year, followed by extortion, investment scams and personal data breaches. The FBI tallied losses amounting to $122.5 million from extortion and $32.3 million from ransomware last year.

The FBI also received more than 75,000 reports of sextortion last year, including more than 5,700 submissions that were referred to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

The top five cyber threats reported to IC3 in 2025 included data breaches at 39%, ransomware at 36%, SIM swapping at 10%, malware at 9% and botnets at 7%. 

The FBI received more than 3,600 complaints reporting ransomware last year. The five most reported variants included Akira, Qilin, INC, BianLian and Play.

Each of the 16 critical infrastructure sectors reported ransomware attacks last year, and the most heavily targeted included health care, manufacturing, financial services, government and IT.

The IC3 primarily receives complaints from U.S. residents and businesses, but it also received complaints from more than 200 countries last year, which accounted for nearly $1.6 billion in total losses. 

While losses and the sheer amount of cybercrime continued to climb last year, “the FBI continues to disrupt and deter malicious cyber actors — and shift the cost from victims to our adversaries,” Perez wrote in the report.

“It has never been more important to be diligent with your cybersecurity, social media footprint, and electronic interactions,” he added. “Cyber threats and cyber-enabled crime will continue to evolve as the world embraces emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence.”

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The recently released executive order targeting cybercrime, fraud, and predatory schemes uses language the federal government has often avoided. Now, for the first time, the Trump administration is echoing what the cybersecurity industry has been shouting for years: cyber-enabled fraud is a product of transnational organized crime.

That distinction matters because organized crime requires an organized response.

Cybercrime is now the world’s fastest-growing criminal economy, built on stealing from everyday people. It is no longer a loose collection of hoodie-wearing hackers in basements or misfits trading malware in online forums. It is a mature global industry operating at scale. In the entirety of human history, there has not been a transfer of wealth of this magnitude since the era of pillaging empires. We have just gotten so used to it that it feels like background noise.

Modern cybercrime groups look less like street gangs and more like corporations. They run structured operations, complete with HR departments, training pipelines, performance metrics, and technology stacks that rival most enterprise companies. Their attackers don’t rely on sophisticated exploits — they think like expert investigators, systematically probing for weaknesses, exploiting psychological pressure, manipulating insiders, and using deception to move through gaps that defenders left open. They operate around the clock, in every time zone, and increasingly use AI to automate attacks at a scale that once required highly skilled operators.

Worse yet is that many of these operations rely on forced labor. Scam compounds in Southeast Asia run like factory floors, with rows of trafficked workers carrying out romance scams, cryptocurrency fraud, and impersonation schemes under threat of violence.

Their goal is to make fraud faster and more profitable. The result is a global criminal ecosystem that extends far beyond online scams. It fuels human trafficking, weapons smuggling, political corruption, compromised organ systems, and even nuclear programs.

If the federal government is ready to recognize what the industry has known — that cybercrime truly operates like an organized global industry — then responding to it solely through traditional law enforcement is not enough. The question goes beyond how governments apply sanctions, coordinate investigations, or pressure jurisdictions that harbor these operations. The greater question is whether the private sector is willing to help dismantle the infrastructure that allows this industry to thrive.

One word changes everything

I want to be specific about why this executive order is different, because the language is not accidental.

The order doesn’t just call these groups “hackers” or “organized crime.” It calls them transnational criminal organizations (TCOs). That word carries legal and operational weight that most coverage has glossed over. Transnational is the jurisdictional framing that authorizes an entirely different class of response. It is the same threshold that moves a case from local law enforcement to federal jurisdiction and beyond.

Pair that with what follows – “law enforcement, diplomacy, and potential offensive actions” – and you are reading something that goes well beyond a policy memo. Notice the sequence: diplomacy before offensive action is proportionality doctrine. But the administration did not rule out offensive action. The document also calls for deploying the “full suite of U.S. government defensive and offensive cyber operations” and uses the word “shape” as its first pillar of action. In military doctrine, shaping an adversary’s behavior does not mean gentle persuasion. It means force is part of the calculus.

This is not the language of a consumer protection policy. Whoever wrote this has studied the opposition.

An organized threat demands an organized response

The executive order draws a line in the sand: cybercrime has outgrown its origins as a consumer protection issue. It’s now a fundamental threat to economic stability and national security. But tackling an industry operating at this scale requires more than government action alone. The order’s answer is to mobilize the private sector – giving companies the green light to identify and disrupt adversary networks.

That framing matters.

The private sector sees the machinery of cybercrime every day. Security vendors, major platforms, and infrastructure providers spot the command-and-control servers, malicious domains, and payment pipelines that keep these operations moving. Too often, that intelligence is used only to defend commercial interests, when in reality, it should also be used to disrupt the networks behind the attacks. When criminal groups lose core infrastructure, they have to rebuild. That costs time. That costs money. That creates pressure.

At the same time, the order puts a question squarely before the private sector: How far is it willing to go, and under what terms? I spent my career believing “minimal force” matters. Precise, proportionate action prevents escalation and avoids creating cascading problems. As we move beyond a defense-only approach, those principles matter more than ever.

There is another question that sits underneath all of this: How far does “potential offensive actions” actually go? Does it stop at cyberspace? Financial sanctions? Asked bluntly, “Will leaders and shareholders know whether providing threat intelligence ends with a measured network take-down or an all-out drone strike on the fraudulent call center?”

Organizations need to fix the security weaknesses criminals are exploiting for profit. Most attacks in 2026 do not succeed because criminals are brilliant. They succeed because the basics are missing. No multifactor authentication. Weak Identity controls. Unpatched vulnerabilities sit open for months. Criminals don’t care about your industry or company size. They go where it’s easiest.

When organizations ignore basic security controls, they are doing more than accepting risk. They’re subsidizing the criminal infrastructure that exploits those gaps.

Governments must keep pressure on nations that harbor these operations. Large-scale cybercrime thrives where enforcement is weak or non-existent. The order specifically calls out “nations that tolerate predatory activity”—a signal that safe havens won’t be ignored. Stronger coordination across governments, law enforcement, and private industry can make it much harder for criminals to operate at scale.

The order also targets “foreign TCOs and associated networks,” with “associated networks” being a deliberately broad phrase. Defining who qualifies will be critical. Draw the lines too narrowly and the policy won’t work. Too broadly and you risk dangerous escalation.

Simply put, cybercriminal groups are disciplined because discipline pays. Disrupting them will require the same. It will demand pressure on countries that act as safe havens. It will take dismantling the infrastructure behind these schemes. It will require better basic security across every organization that criminals target.

The executive order is right – Cybercrime is organized. It is industrial. It is ruthless. For the first time in a long time, the response looks like it might be, too. Whether the government, private sector, and public can align around what this actually demands, and what it risks, are still unanswered questions.

After years of watching policy documents gather dust while victim numbers grow, I will take action over perfection every time.

Kyle Hanslovan is a former NSA cyberwarfare operator and CEO of Huntress Labs.

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Authorities from multiple countries dismantled SocksEscort, a residential proxy network cybercriminals used to commit large-scale fraud, claiming access to about 369,000 IP addresses since 2020, the Justice Department said Thursday.

Europol, which aided the investigation alongside various law enforcement agencies, Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs and the Shadowserver Foundation, said the malicious proxy service compromised routers and IoT devices in 163 countries. Officials said the proxy network’s payment platform received about $5.8 million from its customers.

The globally coordinated action, dubbed Operation Lightning, took down and seized 34 domains and 23 servers in seven countries. U.S. officials froze a combined $3.5 million in cryptocurrency allegedly linked to the botnet that was created from infected devices.

“Cybercrime thrives on anonymity,” Catherine De Bolle, executive director at Europol, said in a statement. “Proxy services like SocksEscort provide criminals with the digital cover they need to launch attacks, distribute illegal content and evade detection.”

SocksEscort’s operators assembled the botnet by exploiting a vulnerability in residential modems from an unnamed vendor, according to officials.

The cybercrime operation defrauded Americans and U.S. businesses of millions of dollars, the Justice Department said. More than one-quarter of the 8,000 infected routers SocksEscort advertised in February were based in the United States.  

SocksEscort began operating in 2009 and its command-and-control infrastructure went undetected by most tools for a very long time, Ryan English, information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop.

The botnet’s infrastructure, which was powered by AVRecon malware, was elusive and maintained a consistently high volume, claiming an average 20,000 victims weekly since early 2024. Its impact peaked in January 2025 when it ensnared more than 15,000 victims daily, according to Black Lotus Labs’ research. 

The company said it observed 280,000 unique IPs as victims of the proxy network since early 2025, and more than half of SocksEscort’s victims were based in the United States and United Kingdom.

“Given the high volume of victim generation, it would not surprise me if they eventually hit something really important that moved them up the list of networks to go after,” Chris Formosa, senior lead information security engineer at Black Lotus Labs, told CyberScoop. 

“They were exclusively marketing to cybercriminals and nowhere else,” he added. “With a network like this, once law enforcement gains legal access to backend infrastructure it can give them a lot of intelligence on other threat actors besides the botnet operators.”

Various agencies from Austria, Bulgaria, Eurojust, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands and Romania assisted in the investigation and takedown.

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