A fraud that used a fabricated cryptocurrency ecosystem as one of its central vehicles has ended in a 30-year prison sentence.

Lawsuit accusing Mark Cuban and the Dallas Mavericks of improperly promoting the failed crypto platform was thrown out on a technicality last year, and the plaintiffs are now taking that dismissal to a federal appeals court.

Microsoft has uncovered a crypto-stealing malware campaign that skips the blockchain entirely and goes straight for the user's device, lifting seed phrases, private keys, and quietly swapping wallet addresses.

Blockchain's permanent record was supposed to make crypto transparent. Binance Research's latest data shows it has also made criminal proceeds structurally impossible to launder at scale.

Maximilien de Hoop Cartier was sentenced to eight years on April 28, 2026, for laundering $470M in Colombian cartel proceeds through USDT and shell companies. The U.S. government seized $2.36M, his commission. The remaining $467.64M is not in the forfeiture order.

Sze Man Yu Inos, known as "Yuki," was sentenced to 71 months in federal prison on April 23, 2026, for a Bitcoin investment fraud scheme that targeted older women across four US jurisdictions over 14 months.

On April 18, 2026, KelpDAO suffered what is now confirmed as the largest decentralized finance exploit of the year - a targeted attack on its LayerZero-powered cross-chain bridge that drained approximately 116,500 rsETH, valued at around $292 to $293 million at the time of the incident.

The Hyperbridge cross-chain gateway connecting Polkadot to Ethereum was exploited on April 13.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received 181,565 complaints tied to cryptocurrency last year - a 21% increase over 2024 - and the losses those complaints represent have now crossed into territory that would have seemed implausible even five years ago.

Federal prosecutors have unsealed charges against ten foreign nationals accused of treating market fraud as a business model - and the scope of the operation makes clear this was no amateur scheme.

The U.S. government's patience with Chinese crypto hardware on American soil is running thin - and Bitmain Technologies is now squarely in the crosshairs.

India's largest crypto exchange is at the center of a legal storm. CoinDCX co-founders Sumit Gupta and Neeraj Khandelwal were apprehended by Thane Police in Bengaluru in March 2026 and remanded to custody until March 23.