The Trump administration continues to pursue stolen cryptocurrency through civil forfeiture proceedings, with the latest complaint involving $5 million in bitcoin taken through SIM swapping attacks.

The Department of Justice’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS) is pursuing funds taken from five victims between late October 2022 and March 2023, according to a news release.

The department did not specify the cases, but said they involve unauthorized transactions from cryptocurrency wallets. The thefts were enabled by SIM swapping, when a criminal is able to assign a victim’s phone number to a phone that they control. SIM swaps allow access to information like multifactor authentication codes for cryptocurrency wallets or other high-value accounts.

“After each of the five thefts occurred, the perpetrators moved the stolen funds through multiple cryptocurrency wallets and ultimately consolidated them into one wallet that funded an account at Stake.com, an online casino,” the Justice Department said. “Many of these transactions were circular in that they eventually returned funds to their original source, and consistent with money laundering utilized to ‘clean’ proceeds of criminal activity.”

Recent cybercrime-related civil forfeiture actions by the department include a claim in June on $225 million in cryptocurrency stolen from Americans by romance scams originating in Asia, and a complaint involving $7.7 million, also in June, that was previously frozen and seized from North Koreans who allegedly obtained the money through the regime’s illicit IT worker scheme. 

In August, the department said it wanted to seize $2.8 million in crypto related to ill-gotten gains from the Zeppelin ransomware, as well as more than $1.9 million taken in cryptocurrency investment schemes.

Agencies at other levels of government can make such complaints, too. In late August, the Los Angeles County government and blockchain intelligence company TRM Labs said they secured funds stolen from two people in romance scams.