An Eastlake man lost $200,000 in a cryptocurrency scam after someone posing as a financial adviser talked him into moving retirement money and then took control of his computer, federal prosecutors say.
Court records described by Cleveland.com put the loss inside a scheme prosecutors call pig butchering: trust first, a fake investment screen second, and an excuse when the victim tries to get the money back. Adam Ferrise reported the case for the site's courts and justice coverage. The person behind the Eastlake fraud has not been publicly identified.
Retirement Money and a Fake Balance
According to those court records, the scammer convinced the man to transfer $600,000 from his retirement account into his bank account. He then sent money from the bank to the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. The records also say the scammer tricked him into allowing remote access to his laptop and secretly took control of the computer to withdraw funds, moving money from the bank account into a cryptocurrency wallet.
What the man was shown did not match what had left his accounts. The scammer displayed a fake wallet with a balance of $860,000, the kind of screen prosecutors say is built to make a victim's money look as if it is growing.
When withdrawal became the question, the story changed. The scammer told him the IRS had frozen the account because of problems with his accountant. The man later told the FBI he had not used that accountant in about five years.
What Agents Could Trace
He reported the scam to the FBI. Agents traced some of the stolen money and seized $62,000 from an Ethereum account. They also found that the scammer's phone number was tied to other people who had already lost money.
That trace does not require a name on the account. Investigators can follow cryptocurrency transactions through publicly available blockchain records without knowing who controls the wallet. Federal prosecutors have asked a judge to approve the seizure so the $62,000 can be returned to the Eastlake man.
A separate Justice Department notice, in a different Northern District of Ohio cryptocurrency forfeiture, spells out the same sequence in plainer terms. If the government succeeds, prosecutors say the United States would then seek to return forfeited funds to the victim. The complaint's allegations are claims the government still has to prove.
A National Loss, and a Local Tally
Federal prosecutors say this style of cryptocurrency fraud has taken billions from U.S. residents in recent years. Officials put pig-butchering losses at $8.3 billion in 2025, up from $5.8 billion in 2024 — a $2.5 billion increase in the figures they cited. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, in its 2025 report, said losses reported to IC3 surpassed $20 billion that year, with investment-related fraud again the largest share. Those are different tallies, not two ways of counting the same pot.
The pattern officials describe starts with a stranger: a text, a dating app, or some other online message. Conversations come before any pitch. Scammers then steer people toward cryptocurrency, set up fake platforms, and produce excuses for why the money cannot be withdrawn.
Closer to home, the FBI in Cleveland has recovered more than $10 million over the past few years for Northeast Ohio residents who lost money to scams. That figure covers scams broadly, not this Ethereum seizure alone.
Who Prosecutors Say Is on the Other End
The filings add a harder fact about the labor behind many of these pitches. Federal prosecutors say many pig-butchering scammers are human-trafficking victims forced to work in compounds in Myanmar and China. That is the government's account of the industry, not an identification of the person who contacted the Eastlake man.
Other Ohio forfeiture cases show agents freezing tokens in separate frauds, not a single local ring. On Nov. 26, 2024, the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Ohio filed a civil forfeiture complaint against 947,883 Tether, valued at about $947,883, tied to a cryptocurrency fraud in which a man was deceived into transferring life savings. In another investment-scam case, the FBI's Cleveland office said an address holding 325,060 USDT — about $325,060 — was frozen, and that Tether later moved those tokens under a federal seizure warrant issued March 20, 2025, after an Ohio brother and sister lost more than $1 million.
For the Eastlake man, the number that matters next is smaller and still in a judge's hands: $62,000 seized from an Ethereum account, against a $200,000 loss prosecutors say is already gone.
