Argentine Prosecutors Arrest 24, Seize Over $8M in USDT in ‘Fake Coins’ Crypto-Fraud Sweep

Argentina’s Buenos Aires Public Prosecutor’s Office said it arrested 24 people and seized more than 8 million $USDT in a nationwide sweep it called “Fake Coins,” one of the largest crypto-enforcement actions in the province’s history.

The 90 simultaneous raids, executed by the Argentine Federal Police’s Cybercrime Directorate, also yielded nearly 60 million pesos in cash and 80 mobile phones. The prosecutor’s office put the dismantled schemes’ total economic damage at almost 3 billion pesos — roughly $2.4 million at recent rates — across more than 100 separate complaints.

The seizure exceeds the more than $2 million in cryptocurrency confiscated in the 2024 RainbowEx operation, the prosecutor’s office said, making “Fake Coins” the largest crypto bust by the province’s specialized crypto-assets team in recent memory. Coordination ran through the Procuracion General’s Equipo de Asistencia y Coordinacion en Materia de Criptoactivos, led by Dr. Rafael Garcia Borda and Dra. Sabrina Lamperti.

The Three Rings the Prosecutors Took Down

The fraud network was not a single operation but three distinct rings, each working a different angle.

The first targeted retail investors with a fake trading application distributed through the Google Play Store, mimicking a legitimate investment platform. Self-styled “financial advisers” — none registered with Argentina’s securities regulator, the Comision Nacional de Valores (CNV) — walked victims through escalating transfers. “The fact that an application is published in Google’s official store does not guarantee its authenticity or the veracity of the financial operations it promises,” the Procuracion General said in its release.

The second ring, traced through the Azul judicial district, hijacked victims’ WhatsApp accounts to impersonate their contacts and offer black-market dollar purchases. Stolen pesos were converted to $USDT through Binance’s peer-to-peer marketplace and forwarded to Binance Pay accounts registered in Venezuela. A single phone IMEI had received more than 100 WhatsApp and WhatsApp Business activation codes — disposable lines used to recontact victims at scale. The Azul branch alone yielded 4,025 $USDT seized from offshore accounts.

The bulk of the 8 million $USDT came from a third ring centered in San Isidro: a Chinese-origin organization the prosecutor’s office said was building piracy apps laced with “infostealer” malware to harvest passwords and banking credentials. On-chain tracing of the proceeds led to the largest single tranche of the seizure.

What the Bust Says About Argentina’s Crypto Perimeter

Argentina has been a recurring node in Latin American crypto-fraud cases. The country’s Generacion Zoe Ponzi scheme — whose ringleader was arrested in Venezuela last year with a reported $56 million in bitcoin — has dragged through Argentine courts for years. Earlier in 2026, the Federal Police arrested another suspect in a separate crypto-fraud ring the Ministry of Security said had inflicted 1.8 trillion pesos in damage on agribusiness firms.

“Fake Coins” lands at a moment when Argentina’s formal crypto-licensing regime — the CNV’s registry of Proveedores de Servicios de Activos Virtuales, or PSAVs, restructured under General Resolution 1058 in 2025 — has been outpaced by the unregistered “adviser” cottage industry the prosecutor’s office describes. None of the people steering victims toward the fake platforms were registered with the CNV.

The Procuracion General said the 8 million $USDT was frozen with the cooperation of private virtual-asset-service providers. The release did not name them or detail whether Binance — whose P2P and Pay rails appear throughout the criminal complaint — was among the cooperating firms.

The 24 detainees face charges including aggravated fraud, illicit association, money laundering, and intellectual-property violations. The Procuracion General has not published the specific charges against each defendant or set a date for the first preliminary hearings.

What’s next: how the seized 8 million $USDT is dispositioned, whether toward victim restitution or provincial coffers, will be the next test of Argentina’s still-young crypto-asset enforcement framework.